Welcome to my first ever blog about me and my shop Fiddlesticks in Honiton Devon.
I opened the shop approx three and half years ago having retired from a lifetime of working mostly in an office environment and having raised the capital from the sale of my house. Looking back at photos of the shop back then I thought I had lots of stock but today the stock is not only in the shop but in warehouse space at my husbands industrial unit and in at least two rooms of our house!
Although the shop is very full I try to keep a space around the centre table to enable pushchairs or wheelchairs to be moved around without too much difficulty. Last Sunday Malcolm (my husband) and I spent eight hours re-arranging the shop in preparation for delivery of my new counter and to make a useable area for the forthcoming courses being held in the shop. The carefully stacked packets of yarn soon slid into a gigantic slippy mountain and the back of one unit sprang off and all the little balls of Debbie Bliss baby cashmerino went flying out, but somehow we got everything back into place and now have a more spacious feel to the room, though you can’t tell that from the pic! It will of course never be big enough so I regularly clear out slower moving lines and overstocks both in the shop and online.
I started knitting at around 5 years old and have memories of pot-holders and dishcloths but my piece de resistance was a knitted rabbit completed when I was 8 which had several layers of clothing, this took about a year to knit with lots of help from my mum with the lacy bits. I am a compulsive knitter and a great starter but tend to leave projects almost finished for ages, then have a sudden splurge on finishing and sewing up. I find that I knit more for shop display than for me, and I leave all the larger projects to my lovely friend Pat Watson, who also designs for the shop (pic below jacket knitted in squares) and the lovely Cindy, who knits garments for me as I need to keep my projects fairly small so that they will get finished.
We have two cats, Dylan and Murphy who are 11 years old. This is Dyl checking out the Jawoll Magic sock yarn.
