Culinary Colors

 

 
December 2007    

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Meg Manning
Meg Manning
Yarn Expressions customers
Yarn dyed with Culinary Colors

In-shop classes
Classes? They're this year's challenge. A few years ago everyone wanted to learn to knit, so they could make the funky scarves that were so popular. Many of those students have become dedicated knitters, and coming up with classes (and people to teach them) to satisfy their thirst for knowledge keeps us on our toes. Speaking of toes – we can never have enough sock classes. No matter how many sock classes we set up, there's always a waiting list.

Deciding what’s on the shelves
I'm getting ready to go to market next month, to buy for the Spring/Summer season. That gets me to thinking about why I choose what I choose to carry at Yarn Expressions. In the beginning I could only go with my gut instincts, and I still do that to a certain extent. I must really like a product in order to promote it to others. Beyond that, I listen to my customers talking about what they'd like to make, I prowl the Internet for new ideas. The companies that help me connect with my customers, with free patterns on their websites, with online forums to promote projects and help with the tricky spots, with great customer service when I need a special order – they're the folks that I go back to year after year.

I've carried Knit One, Crochet Too products at Yarn Expressions since the brand began. It has developed into one of those companies that I depend on, season after season. (Owner) Helene (Rush) has been a part of the knitting industry for as long as I can remember and I think she does a great job of staying ahead of the curve, coming up with fresh new approaches to yarn and knitwear design. Soxx Appeal is a perfect example. The whole world is consumed with making socks. Soxx Appeal allows us to make socks that stay up. How cool is that?

Tip: Easier SSK
Helene also taught me my favorite little knitting trick, one that my customers love as well. It's a different, easier way to create the left leaning decrease SSK. Instead of slipping stitches here and there, putting them back and knitting them together, do this. Put your right needle into the front of your first stitch, leave that stitch on the left needle, and reach around to put the right needle into the back of the second stitch. Now wrap and remove, and voila! You've worked your decrease in one smooth step.

I'll never get rich owning a yarn store, but the pleasure of sharing my love of knitting with the people who walk in my store keeps me unlocking the door every morning. Now if only I could read my customers' minds and know exactly what they want to knit every season...

 

Shop Hop
Alabama shop owner reaches out to knitters everywhere with innovative classes, online shoppping.

Name: Meg Manning
Location: Huntsville, Alabama
Real Job: Owner of Yarn Expressions
Website: www.YarnExpressions.com
How Long Knitting: 48 years

I'm a Midwesterner born and raised (can you say Oconomowoc ten times fast?); we moved to Huntsville 15 years ago. I cried when my husband told me he'd taken a job in Alabama. "They don't knit there," I wailed to my friends at the yarn shop in Ann Arbor, where we'd lived for almost 20 years. The owner told me I was being foolish – she had family in North Alabama and they all knit.

Becoming a shop owner
Our children were in elementary school when we moved, so I chose not to work outside the home, instead focusing on making the transition to a new home as painless as possible for our daughter and son. My friend in Ann Arbor was right; people did knit here. I quickly found the yarn shop, co-owned in fact, by a woman whose daughter I'd gone to high school with in Wisconsin. Small world! That shop closed shortly after we arrived, another one opened up, and I started teaching knitting classes there. When that shop owner announced she was moving, I knew it was time to have a store of my own.

Yarn Expressions opened on May 1, 1995. Although I had no background in business, my husband says I inherited my grandfather's entrepreneurial talents. As with all things, it was a struggle in the first few years just to keep my head above water. I kept at it, though, and today Yarn Expressions is a destination for knitters from all over the Southeast. For those more distant customers we do offer mail order and online shopping. The website is in transition at the moment. We're revamping to add a shopping cart, and hope to have it functional early next month.

LYS joys
While the challenges of owning a yarn store change from year to year, the rewards stay the same, and are constant. That "aha moment" when a customer learns a new technique (s)he's been struggling with; meeting the 8-year-old girl who knits hats to put in the box at school for children who have none; seeing the friendships that are formed around our table; these are the things that make owning Yarn Expressions such a joy. I also am blessed with the best staff in the world. Not only are they talented knitters in their own right, they have become my closest friends.

Current projects
What's my favorite type of project? There's only one style of knitting you won't see in my basket. That's intarsia. I love the look of it, I dislike the doing of it. Everything else, from fair isle to entrelac, makes an appearance on my needles. Texture was my first big love in knitting – I knitted Aran sweaters in high school when I should have been studying. Right now it seems that I'm following the trend toward smaller projects. I have a lace scarf for my at-home no-distractions project, and several socks in various stages of completion scattered here and there.

My current fascination is with the interplay of color, so I'm learning to dye yarn and spinning fiber. Knit One, Crochet Too is making that easy with their new Culinary Colors – what a great product! I have a long way to go to perfection, but I sure am having fun experimenting.

  

 

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