Ashley Sinclair crochets an emotional support chicken that’s become a hit with Oilers fans.JASON FRANSON/The Globe and Mail
Ashley Sinclair is a colossal Edmonton Oilers fan. And like other diehard followers, she grows especially anxious when her favourite team competes in the Stanley Cup playoffs.
So a couple of years ago she crocheted herself an emotional support chicken, and found it to be of comfort while she watched the Oilers blow leads and mount comebacks during the postseason. She had taught herself the craft while pregnant. On weekends, she would occasionally go to markets and sell maybe a dozen or so of her various creations.
Last year she made a dozen – and they sold out quickly. Now, in her home in the Edmonton suburb of Sherwood Park, she is surrounded by balls of yarn. Here a chicken, there a chicken, everywhere an emotional support playoff chicken.
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“I thought people might like them,” Ms. Sinclair says. “I thought that maybe I could sell 20 over a couple of months.”
She started crocheting more this year and posted a video promoting her birds on TikTok during an intermission of an Oilers’ first-round playoff game against the Los Angeles Kings.
Now she is literally counting her chickens before they hatch.
She received so many orders that at one point she had to cap them at 500. Currently, she has a waiting list of another 175 and has had to enlist the help of four other crocheters. Unlike knitting, crochet can only be done by hand.
“I am completely shocked,” she says. “Now it has become my life. It’s a moment every small business dreams about.”
Her day job is working at an elections office in Strathcona County, so she ends up making the chickens late into the night. Each takes about 40 minutes from start to finish. They sell for $20 and can be ordered through her Instagram page.
She weighs each of them down with 97 grams of polyester fibrefill. Yes, that’s Edmonton captain Connor McDavid’s jersey number.
“Anyone who watches Oilers playoff games gets very emotional,” Ms. Sinclair says. “I think I could do another 500 if the Oilers go on a long run.”
The Oilers, who made it through two rounds in 2023 and to the Stanley Cup final in 2024, have advanced to the third round again, facing Dallas. The Stars led the best-of-seven series 1-0 headed into Friday night’s game.
Ms. Sinclair’s husband, Tim, who is a member of the Canadian Forces, is spending extra time with their two-year-old son, Ronan, so that she can spin a lot more yarn. He also makes chicken deliveries all over Edmonton and goes on supply runs.
JASON FRANSON/The Globe and Mail
But her Oilers-themed works are so popular that it’s become hard to find orange and blue yarn in the city’s craft stores, and she’s had to go online for materials.
“I have balls of yarn coming to me in the mail,” she says.
Emotional support chickens of all kinds have become popular with fiber artists. People make them to help anxious children and cheer up hospital patients, among countless other reasons. While Ms. Sinclair’s are 12 by eight centimetres, some are as large as their real-life counterparts.
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Ms. Sinclair recently adopted an emotional support playoff chicken made by one of her fellow crocheters. She named it McDrai. As in McDavid and Leon Draisaitl – the other half of Edmonton’s star scoring duo.
It seems others have the same idea. One customer reached out to let her know they had named their chicken “Mattias Eggholm,” after Edmonton defenceman Mattias Ekholm.
Earlier this week, Ms. Sinclair came home for lunch to meet a customer in her driveway. The woman said the chicken she had ordered was a gift for her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease.
Meanwhile, Ms. Sinclair‘s chickens have been making their way across Canada. She has sent one to a fan in New Brunswick who stays up late to watch Oilers games. A couple in Ontario took their chicken with them to visit the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.
“There are lots of crazy stories coming back to me,” she said. “That’s something I really treasure.”
