When Colleen Deatherage started knitting, she didn’t realize it was going to become far more than a hobby.
“I just started knitting like everyone else, but it started to become an obsession,” she said. “I really love the colour, I love the feel of nice yarn and I love having something practical at the end. It’s practical art, and at the end you have something very tangible.”
That led the self-professed “yarn snob” to make sure others could get obsessed, too, opening the Needle and Quill about a year ago in a corner of Paula Ebelher’s 12th Avenue Hair and Esthetics, offering fibre-related products such as hooks, books, dying materials and handmade items. The shop-within-a-shop is a compromise that allows Deatherage to share her passion without having to sacrifice her career.
“I love my day job, so I wouldn’t be willing to give that up,” said Deatherage. “It’s only because of the partnership that it works.”
She previously ran an online store, but found the physical location to be a bigger benefit to the community.
“I wish more people would consider this type of partnership,” she said. “It’s not just that the dollars stay in town but also our own interests. When we take our interests out of town, we take the dollars out of town. …
“People seem really happy there’s yarn in town. They’re really happy to buy it here.”
And it also makes it possible for like-minded people to get together — Ebelher opens the salon up weekly for Textile Tuesdays, an evening event when textile enthusiasts can be found spinning, knitting and felting all over the shop.
“A whole bunch of people come together, and it’s so fun to see people relaxing and de-stressing,” Deatherage said.
Deatherage, who lived both in the Kootenays and at the Coast while growing up, moved to Creston 12 years ago to become the clinical director at Valley Community Services (then the Creston and District Community Resource Centre), where the pattern repetition of knitting has become a useful treatment tool.
“I’m going to teach knitting so the staff can use it with kids,” she said. “It’s a nice crossover.”
She finds knitting to be therapeutic and relaxing, but it also allows her to create homemade presents. Deatherage was always stocking up on yarn in Creston’s former McDowell’s Department Store as she made her way through her list of friends and family.
“I think everyone got a scarf one year,” she said.
But she’s not interested in working with just any yarn — synthetic yarn (though sometimes necessary due to allergies) typically isn’t a favourite.
“You always want something that feels good on your hands, otherwise why keep doing it?”
She takes that a step farther, too, not just settling for whatever colours she can stock, using natural dyes from a Seattle company and Wynndel’s Garden Hoe Farms, and adding colour to undyed yarn. The dying process — which Deatherage will teach in Alberta this summer — creates variations, with each dye lot producing three to five skeins of unique yarn.
As if the brilliantly coloured yarn wasn’t enough, Deatherage also offers Japanese paper, and can bring in looms and wheels for customers who want them.
Deatherage’s shop tucked in the corner of a larger shop isn’t the only evidence of partnership — among the yarn and textile products are local items, including Bad Duck Caramel and pottery by Andrea Revoy. And for another example of Creston Valley business owners working together, Bart and Alison Bjorkman may soon offer Deatherage’s textiles in their soon-to-open 15th Avenue shop.
“There’s more collaboration than competition,” said Deatherage. “I feel I really see a side of Creston I wouldn’t see otherwise.”
