About

Jess is married to her Jr. High sweetheart and together they have three daughters. Jazzie has also been a nanny and continues to be a nanny. She just has a way about her that the babies love.

Jazz and I have always created together. We spent many hours in the kitchen when she was a teenager we even took gourmet cooking classes. She was always an outdoor girl. She loved camping and raising chickens and even a rabbit we hid in her room for a few days.

When Jazz and I would go shopping for yarn we could never find what we were looking for. There was always a color in our head and they just weren’t out there in the commercial world. All of the baby yarns were a set of four colors, pastel, baby blue, soft yellow and mint green and they were all acrylic.

We don’t have anything against acrylic yarn we just wanted to knit and crochet with natural fibers. I had begun buying yarns from small batch dyers online and had been wanting to try dying my own for a couple of years. I asked Jess if she would like to try dying some with me and Driftwood Farms was born.

Jess had also been pouring candles for a friend who had a gift shop. When the gift shop closed she suggested we add candles in to complement the yarn and from there we had the product ideas now we just needed to figure out how to go about it. She researched clean burning waxes,fragrance oils and wicks and formulated her first candles. They looked different then than they do now, but those early formulations are still the ones she uses today.

As for the yarn together we bought some mill run wool and a handful of professional quality dyes and went for it. Our first yarns were not always a success, but we learned from every hank. It didn’t take too long until we bought our first Extra-Fine Merino and Cashmere blends. We sold our first yarns in April of 2018 and then participated in our local farmers market and any other local festivals we could find. We were consistently selling yarns and candles every week.

Soon customers were asking if we had a shop; a place where knit groups and classes could happen. We talked about it a bit and we found a small space in a local mall that didn’t work out, but a small shop in Reedsport, OR was offered to us and we took the opportunity. That was in August of 2019.

As you know by March of 2020 our shop would have to shutter the doors for close to three months. It was a very scary time for us, but our customers were very loyal and they kept us going. They used our Etsy shop and bought yarn from us consistently. It was very humbling to know that so many people really cared about us and wanted us to succeed.

Now we are growing the shop we left Etsy and started our own web site, we are adding in commercial yarns to compliment the hand dyes. Jess dyes beautiful fiber for the folks who like to spin and coming in the new year we will have hand dyed embroidery floss.

We offer classes and are hoping to expand our class list this year, we have knit groups that meet in both the daytime and evening hours and our customer base keeps growing. We are very blessed and honored to serve each and every one of you. Words cannot express our gratitude.