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Arts & Entertainment

Knitting a Community

For 35 years, Arlene Jacobson has hooked handcrafters into Needle Nook's helping hub.

Modern business relies on networks – from roads to fiber optics to word of mouth. For 35 years, Arlene Jacobson's success has rested on the strength of countless threads that began with a simple strand of yarn as all knitting projects do.

Her shop, , has been a fixture since 1976 at Briarcliff and Lavista roads and in the hearts of hand crafters both locally and nationally through the web of Internet sales. One international yarn manufacturer thanked Jacobson by naming a color after her.   

For stitchers in metro Atlanta, Needle Nook is their headquarters for yarns and classes and reliable help when life unravels. On a 1,600 square foot foundation of merchandise, Jacobson has built them a home.

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“This is not something I could stop doing, even if I wanted to,” said Teresa Fox, a shopper since 1977 on a recent spree.

She bought a bouquet of six skeins of basic wool yarn, from black to evergreen to purple to mulberry.

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“I’m a knitting teacher now, and I tell my students this is the best store. I’ve always gotten the help I needed.”

The shop serves a diverse clientele including a Sunday afternoon men’s knitting group. Hotel concierges ring up after sending their well-heeled guests in a taxi to Needle Nook. The store even supplied yarn for a maker of exotic dance outfits who didn’t need much of it.

"I couldn’t understand how little amount of yarn she was buying for an outfit,” Jacobson, now 66, said. “Then she brought in her album, and the space between each stitch was about [the size of a golf ball]. It was shocking.” 

Even the most intricate patterns–from the tiny cross-stitch samplers sold in the 1970s to the intarsia (picture) sweaters of today–boil down to one loop after another. So also Needle Nook, as Jacobson tells it, grew from small steps. Foresight, good breaks and generosity helped the store survive and its popularity snowball. 

Jacobson was a mother of two young daughters when her husband urged her to start a business at a cute storefront down the street where a children’s clothing shop had just closed.

Jacobson learned to knit in Brooklyn, NY, from her grandmother and made an acrylic, yellow V-neck sweater in 1960 when she was 15 years old. As an adult new to Atlanta, she and her sister taught themselves needlepoint through countless mistakes.

Could she build a career serving others like herself, who didn’t like sitting still and usually formed something creative with their hands?

On March 20, 1976, she and a partner opened Needle Nook in a 900 square foot space (now occupied by ).

“There were years and months that I thought I’d never be able to take any money out of this business,” said Jacobson, whose girls went to Briarcliff High School and Druid Hills. She bought out her partner and moved into her current space next to .

Jacobson was building emotional currency, however. Customers knew they could always bring their tangled and matted projects to Needle Nook and leave with those sorted out. When sick children or adults needed items of comfort, Jacobson marshaled help.

Pausing her story, she produces a plastic bag full of tiny hats for premature babies. More than 300 caps have been donated to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston. Adult hats supply the cancer support organization Chemoflage. Some customers make helmet liners for troops overseas.

Customers and creative groups known as guilds consistently drop off donations such as blankets, tracheotomy bibs (known as stoma covers) and leprosy bandages. A sidewalk sale in the spring benefits the Ovarian Cycle fundraiser. A drawing for a handmade shawl raised $500 for Our House, serving homeless families in Decatur.

“This year we are doing clothing for the teddy bears used to interview kids after a traumatic event in their homes,” Jacobson said.

Customers also donated $800 for Japan, which the yarn company Knitting Fever will match.

“Knitters and guilds have always had the extra gift of charity and camaraderie,” said Joni Rotruck, a customer of 25 years now like a sister to Jacobson. “You can knit only so many pairs of socks for families, and babies grow up. Knitting for charity means I get to knit more.”  

Jacobson kept a pragmatic eye to trends in needle arts. As celebrities such as Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz and others started coming out of their trailers with their knitting projects, Jacobson stocked more and varied yarns, needles and books. Today the needlepoint canvases that drew original customers to Needle Nook occupy only a small wall space.

More young people got hip to knit, and today at least 38 million Americans either knit or crochet, according to the Craft Yarn Council.

A factor in Needle Nook’s success is the viral nature of yarn work. Of the people who pick up knitting needles or crochet hooks, 80 percent teach someone else the skill, according to last fall’s online survey of 5,000 hand crafters by Research Inc. of Atlanta for the yarn council.

Despite Internet competition, Jacobson expects her store to remain stable. She took a break from learning to use her new Nook reader to explain.

“People want to see, touch, smell and rub the yarn across their faces,” she said. “It can be a different color on the screen and you can’t see the texture of it.”

“We tell people that it’s OK to pet the yarn,” Rotruck said.

A helping hand can’t reach out from a computer like it can across her counter.

“You can look up a video on YouTube to help you cast on or do anything,” Jacobson said. “But people want to get away from the computer, chill out and have that old, slow down time. They say knitting is the new yoga.”

The same survey showed that crafters visit a yarn retailer nearly three times during each project and usually choose the store for its color selection.

In Jacobson’s dreams, Needle Nook is stocked only with her favorite color – purple. When Malabrigo Yarn of Uruguay wanted to thank her for her support, it named a new color “Arlene’s Purple.”

“I’ve had to tell her on buying trips, ‘Don’t you realize that everything we bought is purple?’” Rotruck said. “Can we add some red for variety?”

When an employee told Jacobson customers wanted brown yarn, she replied, “Why?”         

Expanding her color palette, like becoming more patient and knowing her limits, was part of the journey for Jacobson.

“The requirement of a yarn shop is to help and people need to believe that when they ask for it, they will get it,” she said. “I can relate to people one on one, but I can’t teach six of them and still retain them as customers. If I didn’t have good employees, I would have been closed long ago.”

Jacobson planned to retire after 25 years, then after 30, and then 35. “I don’t see another five years, but it depends,” she said.

She said she would like to retire to Hilton Head Island, SC, because the beach is her happy place. For now she will continue making her 1/4-mile commute to Needle Nook where her heart and many others are bound together in a million little stitches.  

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