My name is Debbie Johnson.  I’m the owner of Hampton Artistic Yarns (a.k.a. H.A.Y.) and I’m a hand spinner and hand dyer from Eastern Long Island.  I sell fiber and yarn online, but try to vend at as many local festivals as possible because, for me, meeting like-minded fiber enthusiasts is just awesome.  In addition, I’ve been teaching an after-school  knitting class at the local elementary school for the last 3 winters and hope to add spinning and weaving to the sessions in the upcoming years.

I’ve been interested in handcrafting since a very young age.  My mother taught me to knit when I was 6 years old.  My earliest projects were a purple scarf for my favorite Pooh  doll and a couple of blankets for my Barbie house.  As time went on, my zest for knitting slowly faded.  It wasn’t until I became a stay-at-home Mom in 1997 that I picked up knitting again.  I started a sampler blanket – the kind where every square is a different stitch pattern – so that I could refresh my memory.  Well, I soon realized that I’ve got a VERY short attention span for knitting.  I never did finish that blanket, or much else for that matter, even though I’m still knitting 12 years later.  I start lots of projects (at least one a month), but finish few.  Oddly enough, my huge pile of knitting UFO’s is what led me to spinning…

As my commercial yarn stash grew and my unfinished projects continued to mount, I realized that it’s not the finished item that I liked about knitting.  It was the yarn experience.  I loved the color of it and the texture of it.  Yarn EXCITED me!  Nothing gave me more joy than to spend an afternoon in my LYS touching (and yes, smelling!) all of the different yarns.  I’d buy yarn just because I liked the way that it looked and felt with no plans to ever use it.  It was ridiculous! Then, one afternoon when I entered the shop, I saw Ozark Handpsun.  I loved the chunkiness, the wildness, the color and texture!  I asked the owner of the shop about it and she called it “art yarn” which was something that she said that she’d just acquired an appreciation for .  I’d never heard the term & Googled it as soon as I got home.  That led me to inhope’s  Etsy shop where she had a listing for “Roses are Red” .   This yarn captured my imagination immediately – I HAD to have it!  I’d never had the opportunity to buy handspun before and was so excited that I found a place on the web with so many choices!  Once it showed up on my doorstep, I spent a lot of time feeling it and trying to figure out how it was made.  Looking at it made me realize that yarn could be anything at all.  It could be yarn just for the sake of being yarn.  It didn’t have to exist for the end product – the scarf, mittens or sweater (although I did turn that yarn into the cutest handbag).  It could just BE!

That was it for me – there was no turning back.  I ordered a drop spindle that very week and sought out a teacher.  After my first session, I went home and spun a little every day.  Two weeks later I owned my first wheel.  Now I have 2 wheels, a drum carder, dyeing supplies and a loom.  I find spinning to be very relaxing (almost meditative) and whenever I feel like I need to unwind, I like to sit and spin a simple single or 2 ply yarn.  When I’m feeling especially creative and energetic, I either tackle an art yarn technique that incorporates some fun add-ins that I’ve been stockpiling or I pull out my dye pots and start playing with color.  All in all, I’d say that fiber’s on my mind or in my hands most every day of the week, which is just how I like it!

Editor’s notes:

You can find much more of Debbie in these places:

Website:  http://www.hamptonartisticyarns.com
Shop:  http://www.hamptonartisticyarns.etsy.com
Blog:  http://hamptonartisticyarns.blogspot.com
Fiber Co-Op: http://www.hyencart.com/Spindies
Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/HamptonArtisticYarns
Twitter:  http://www.twitter.com/HamptonArtYarns