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Alma’s Yarn Shop Celebrates 45 Years
(by Rebecca Riley and Renee Lagala - June 04, 2008)
In a modest yellow house on North Seminary Street in Barre, Alma Hedding has operated a one-woman yarn shop for 45 years. In a small remodeled room, she offers an extensive selection of quality yarns, patterns and the tools of the trade.
The Ňherstory’ of how she came to run the shop combines tragedy, courage, and strength. In 1963, Hedding’s husband suffered a stroke following an accident at work in which he was pinned between two blocks of granite. When he required a new set of dentures because of changes in his jaw resulting from partial paralysis due to a stroke after the accident, they visited Cecile Proulx, who made dentures in a shop in her home. Proulx had a yarn shop in her home, which had been her focus until her husband’s poor health prompted her to take over the denture business. As a result, her yarn inventory was low and she decided to look for someone to buy her business. Cecile offered the yarn business to Hedding, who discussed it with her husband, thinking he would object. He surprised her with encouragement and helpfulness, and on June 1st 1963, Alma’s Yarn Shop opened its doors.
In this small, neatly organized space where not so much as a square inch has been overlooked, an astonishing range of yarns can be found. A small step stool allows one to reach all levels of the floor-to-ceiling yarn bins. Pegboards hold knitting needles, crochet hooks and accessories on the wall behind an antique glass display case, which serves as a sales counter while also showing off sample garments Hedding has knit so customers can see how new yarns look when knitted. On the counter rest the latest instruction books, while slim vertical racks, custom built for the shop, contain pattern leaflets spanning several decades.
Alma’s Yarn Shop has outlasted several of the yarn companies that supplied her shop, such as Nomis out of Massachusetts and Steinburger out of New York. Over the years, Candide has remained and Patons out of still supplies many of the yarns she carries. Hedding observes that wools have increased in popularity over the past ten years following a long spell of disfavor due to the expense and the bother of hand washing, a chore that one can avoid since the manufacture of machine washable wool yarn. She also observed that at one time, Lopi Icelandic wool (a hand washable yarn popular for felting) came in a limited range of colors, mostly browns and grays, but with increasing popularity the range of colors has expanded to over one hundred. Hedding recounts how early synthetic yarns did not hold their shape well and were difficult to work with. Once the quality improved, they became a favorite of her customers, who have stayed loyal to Dˇcor, a blend of 75% acrylic and 25% wool from the Patons company, as well as Canadiana, a good quality 100% acrylic yarn from the same company.
Hedding has had time to observe trends in needlework, such as the short, intense popularity of broomstick and hairpin lace, and the much longer span of popularity of rug yarn for all sorts of projects. She could hardly keep the rug yarn on the shelf. Most recently, novelty scarf yarns have drawn young people back to needlework, and an interest in sock knitting has been building for some years and continues to grow, fed by an expanding array of colorful yarns.
Having her shop at home has worked well for Hedding because she was able to combine it with caring for her husband and bookkeeping for a local rubbish company. At one time she thought about renting retail space downtown but is glad she didn’t, because the extra expense of Main Street rent and the need to hire help sometimes would have been difficult to sustain during the slow summer months and the times when she needed to be elsewhere. She feels very fortunate to have regular customers, some of whom have been patronizing the shop for thirty years, and she notes that new customers keep coming by. She enjoys visiting with her customers and sharing her vast experience of needlework. She keeps a small photo album full of snapshots of things she has made and designed, some of them so ambitious they have required more than 900 hours of work.
Alma’s Yarn Shop is a treasure not only for those seeking yarn and knitting advice, but also as an example of small business spirit and success. Turning 80 this fall, Hedding has an air of youthfulness and energy. Her 45-year achievement is being celebrated with a 15% off sale from June 1st through June 7th with a door prize drawing on the final day.
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