Friday, February 12, 2010
Close-knit bunch starts a colorful business
At the Yarn Explosion (from left): Lynn Mason, Susan Davis, Brenda Hundley, Jane Jones. — Priscilla Richardson, Botetourt View
Priscilla Richardson is columnist The Botetourt View. You can contact her at 981-3430 or via e-mail.
Priscilla Richardson
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If you want to see what a yarn explosion looks like, stop by the yarn shop run by three Botetourt ladies. They call it Yarn Explosion for good reason. They carry every color yarn available, yarn in silk, wool, acrylic, cotton, alpaca, cashmere and so on. The dazzle as you walk in warms you even on a bitter cold day. Which it was the day I visited.
This growing business started with a lunch. "Marilee [Fincastle's Marilee Williamson] called Susan [Buchanan's Susan Davis] and me to lunch," Daleville's Jane Jones said. That March 2008 menu turned out to include plans for a new business. These three all regularly bought yarn for their own needle crafts from a yarn shop called Needle in the Square on Electric Road, the other side of Roanoke. And Needle was going out of business because the ladies running it wanted to retire.
This Botetourt trio wanted something different for their lives, but not retirement. Williamson, a professor of early childhood education at Virginia Western Community College, wanted to change careers. Jones, a registered nurse, was already teaching knitting at Needle. Each of them had been thinking about opening a yarn shop independently of the other.
"Call it kismet, serendipity," Jones said. "Where did I get the idea? It just came to me, I'm not sure how," Williamson said. And Davis was interested in moving beyond her extensive volunteer work for Buchanan's revitalized theater.
Maybe one day someone will put up a plaque over the place where they met that day. But they got far too busy finding a place, obtaining merchandise, gathering teachers and so on to worry about history.
The place they found offers about 1,600 square feet of display area, plus several large rooms for classes.
Early on they decided to give a strong emphasis to needlepoint. Ashley's Lynn Mason comes to the shop every Thursday to give individual help. "There are over 10,000 different stitches in needlepoint," she noted. You can work on already painted canvases or work on blank canvas with counted stitches.
They not only offer a wide selection of painted canvases but they can order custom-painted ones to coordinate with a design. For example, dining room chair seat covers with the same pattern as your wallpaper.
Becky Bolling and Brenda Hundley teach knitting lessons at all different levels. "I taught Becky how to knit," Jones said. "And now she's teaching classes." Hundley, a veteran instructor at Needle for 22 years, also gives classes needlepoint and crochet.
The founders and employees pride themselves on their personal service. They work hard to get hard-to-find yarn and do "lots of special orders," Jones said. "We work for hours, days, on something to make a customer happy. Our motto is, 'We try.' "
Jones, 61, a Florida native, is married to the retired Botetourt superintendent of instruction, Garland Jones. Davis, 58, although a North Carolina native, had been a stay-at-home mother and wife as well as volunteer leader. Williamson, 55, feels "very happy" to have given up teaching for running this business. "When you have dreams about it you know it's the right thing."
After only a year and half the business is growing all the time. "We have lots of new folks and very loyal customers, and ones from an extended geographic area," Williamson said. You can find the place on the web at YarnExplosion.com, call 540-206-2638, or just come by Airport Road directly across from the ECPI Technical College building.
So if you want to see what a yarn explosion looks like, stop by the Yarn Explosion.
