Fiber Voyeur: The Yarn Garden

Despite a growing pile of academic reading I should have been delving into, I started Kate Jacobs' Knit Two last night, her sequel to The Friday Night Knitting Club, revisiting the familiar characters and yarn-filled space of Walker and Daughter. Forty pages in, it's similar to that first novel: light reading peppered with characters I can't help but want to know and knit with. The novel picks up five years after the conclusion of The Friday Night Knitting Club and the circumstances the characters find themselves are not the only things to have changed. The very walls of Walker and Daughter have changed as well, which is a little hard to bear but totally expected. Five years have passed, it is only natural the store, so integral to the book and characters within it, should change as well. What makes it so difficult is Walker and Daughter is the store we all wish we gathered at on knit nights with friends - it embodies everything one could possibly want in a great yarn store: experienced, energetic service, a lovely selection of fiber, and space to sit, talk, and work the needles for a while.

The closest I've ever come to Walker and Daughter is the lovely Yarn Garden, located in Charlotte, Michigan. Charlotte is a small bedroom community outside of Lansing that continues to host small-town events like Frontier Days, always held the weekend after Labor Day, and has a small, yet sustainable downtown. The Yarn Garden is in an old building off a side street downtown, facing their historic courthouse. The facade is merely a hint at the personality awaiting inside the heavy, old wooden double doors.

The Yarn Garden is a cozy space but the soaring ceilings, low shelves packed with yarn, and staging make it a delight. Lindsay Harmon, the owner of the Yarn Garden and blogger over at Yarn Gnome, loves knitting and her selections in stock show. On the shelves, you will find classic yarns, Cascade 220 and Berroco, along with some lovely surprises, like Yak. It is a thoughtfully laid out space, with carefully selected yarns and brilliant ideas to go with them.

I happened to spend a day at the shop last weekend, taking a mitten class. The back of the shop has space for classes, a long table right next to the sale bins, which I think was strategic as I walked out of the shop with three skeins of yarn, totally destroying my goal of no yarn unless there is a project in mind. But when you see it, you gotta grab it, you know? The instructor for the class, Janeen Licatovich, designed a mitten called the Cathedral Window Mitten. I saw a sample of it when visiting the store last fall and was excited to get to finally take the class. Janeen teaches several classes at The Yarn Garden and her colorwork is amazing. I fumble through my colorwork projects with the hope I will, one day, be as good as she is. Anyway, I learned how to make the mitten, which is sitting in a basket next to my bed, having not been touched since. Grad school is definitely getting in the way of my knitting time.

I like to think of The Yarn Garden as something of a local yarn store away from my local yarn store. There's always plenty to look at, a delightful mix of standard yarns with specialty yarns, and great people.

It's the template upon which I build Walker and Daughter in my mind while reading: exposed brick walls, store samples that make me wish I had more skill, and lovely, lovely yarns just waiting to be made into something. Also: if you get a chance to visit (and I highly recommend you do), be sure to pet Noro, the shop pup, but don't bring any treats. He's on a diet.