about indie yarn club

Meet Katy Stevens, the founder, dyer, and creative force behind Indie Yarn Club. Based in Folkestone, Kent on the south-east coast of the UK, Katy has a lifelong passion for crafting. She spends her days creating colourful and experimental hand-dyed yarns using natural fibres, with a dedication to quality and a commitment to sustainability.

Indie Yarn Club specialises in colourful speckles; vibrant semisolids for colourwork; and subtle, wearable interpretations of “neon” yarn dyed with UV-reactive dyes.

“My lifelong love affair with crafting led to me requesting a box of polymer clay for Christmas in 2015 (at the age of 28). I began making polymer clay crochet hooks straight away; eventually making them decent enough to sell on Etsy, alongside stitch markers, designed-by-me enamel pins, and eventually, hand-dyed yarn.

“Because I was also co-hosting Folkestone’s Harbour Crochet community group, alongside writing beginner crochet tutorials and blogging about my crochet and knitting projects at the time, I had a small audience already - on Instagram in particular - which I believe helped my yarns to get snapped up pretty quickly. The business began to grow.

“I offered my first monthly Yarn Clubs in 2018 via my Etsy shop, and by 2019 I was ready to build and launch my own website.

“Co-founding the Daughters of Industry, a creative collective of Folkestone natives, helped the business grow even more. We enjoyed 2+ years of pop-up shops on Folkestone’s Old High Street, a Folkestone Independent Marketplace Christmas Market cabin on the Harbour Arm, and local Creative Quarter and Etsy Kent markets.

“In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and almost immediately after having my youngest child (!), I finally settled on a new name for my business. This had been brewing for a long time, since “Harbour Crochet” didn’t actually describe what the business had become (which was almost exclusively hand-dyed yarn by this point). So I rebranded and became Indie Yarn Club.

“I focus heavily on sustainability, and I’m constantly learning, researching, and striving to make my process and my products the very best that they can be.”

- Katy Stevens

Read more about Indie Yarn Club’s sustainability policy here.