How Knitting came to The Hut

People often ask me if I always wanted to open a Wool Shop but the answer is no! I came up with the idea after visiting other shops and, as well as not finding what I was looking for, experiencing bad customer service which made me really cross.

After visiting The Knitting and Stitching Show in Harrogate with a friend of mine and discussing all the way there and back (four hours each way) how I could do it the thought just wouldn’t leave my head.

A week later I mentioned this to another friend who said there was an empty shop on The High Street in Woburn Sands and so I rang up the owner, looked at it the following day and agreed to rent it!  That was at the beginning of December and after a lot of hard work renovating the shop I opened on Saturday 11th February 2006.

As you can see from the first photograph, there was a lot of work to do and I spent most of the Christmas period working on getting the shop stripped back and repaired.  It is just as well my wall filling skills are hidden by the wallpaper and behind the dresser top - that definitely was not my forte!

If you are wondering who is in the pram that Andrea is looking after, it's my now ten year old daughter, who has also modelled for the Merry Christmas Sweaters book. In the second picture Alix is chatting to Jenny on our newly installed second settee after our makeover in May.

Choosing the yarns for the shop was the fun bit but how do you choose? Which yarns, what colours? A very big learning curve and I would say eight years on I am still learning.