In the middle of the beginning

After talking through my ideas with my Saturday morning library group and my Thursday evening The Noble group, geed on by their enthusiasm for the project, I decided to borrow some money - not too much mind - and make some orders.

I read lots of reviews of yarns and noted the yarns that I had used and enjoyed and began approaching companies and distributors. Some companies I really wanted to work with completely ignored me but most of them took me seriously and didn’t judge a market stall on the Holloway Road to be too insignificant a concern for them, indeed one of the reps pointed out to me that one of his great regular customers started out her business as a stall and then an online shop and finally moved into ‘real life’ retail after some time. Getting samples of yarn in and shade cards was exciting but also frustrating because with my budget I couldn’t even get a fraction of what I wanted to. I decided that I would mostly order what I would like to buy, so, no novelty yarns and no acrylics! I decided to begin with as big a range of colours of cotton as I could afford, as I would be opening in summer, and a modest range of my other yarns.

Whilst most of the wools are hand wash only I did plump for a gorgeous new merino from Artesano which is machine washable.

In the beginning of the beginning

A while ago I started thinking, not very seriously, about opening a shop selling hand knitting wools, cottons, bamboos etc. I was regularly going to a knitting group at my local library run by the rather brilliant Sara Noble and feeling happy, calm and inspired. We got to chatting about wool and where we all bought ours from and how there really was nowhere locally selling interesting and good quality yarns. I started checking out all the places that did sell yarns locally and they were almost exclusively selling a small range of cheap acrylics and I started talking to knitting shop owners about their experiences of owning a yarn shop. After one particularly enlightening and enjoyable weekend in Scarborough visiting my friend Kim and nosing round the two yarn shops there, Multi-ply and Knitter's World, sitting drinking tea and chatting to the owners I made up my mind that I would open a shop in Crouch End. I had no experience but what the hell, that was the message that was coming across to me, just do it!

After checking out shop rents in Crouch End, £30,000+, I realised that perhaps I wasn’t ready to open a shop – more or less on a whim – and it would be a good idea to look into ways of selling yarns locally without all that financial risk. I started investigating local markets and decided upon Archway Market on Holloway Road. A lovely little market, still trying to establish itself, it seemed almost just right for my little venture. The only problem with the market is it is outdoors so I had to think of a solution to the problem that wool cannot get wet at all and then be sold.