Brooks: Sew long, Joann. Minnesota’s fabric stores step up to serve crafting community.

Lynn Barbeau’s daughter gave her a gift one day; yards of fabric, in a pretty dove-gray plaid.

Barbeau knew she could make something out of it. She just wasn’t sure how.

“I might be older, but I never learned sewing when I was younger,” she said. “My mother didn’t sew.”

So she turned to her neighborhood fabric shop.

On a sunny Saturday, she and a group of other beginners gathered in the back room of Knit & Bolt in northeast Minneapolis to turn cloth into clothes. They were learning how to sew a skirt. One with pockets.

Elsewhere, the biggest fabric chain in the nation was going out of business, liquidating inventory, stores and jobs in 49 states and more than 20 Minnesota communities. As Joann Fabrics sank into bankruptcy, local stores like Knit & Bolt prepared to step up.

But no one was celebrating.

I grew up in the aisles of fabric stores. I learned how to sew from my mother, who learned from her mother, an Irish seamstress who did piece work in a menswear factory. “Crotches and cuffs,” Grandma would tell us. Crotches and cuffs were her specialty.

Mom sewed our clothes, and sometimes our toys. My sisters and I would trail her through the fabric store for what felt like hours, lobbying unsuccessfully for sparkly fabric and rhinestone buttons. One day, Joann’s bought out our tiny local shop and replaced it with a bigger, brighter fabric store with even sparklier buttons.

So of course I hit the going-out-of-business sales. The shelves at one Twin Cities soon-to-be closed Joann’s were picked over, the sale prices weren’t that great and the selection of sparkly buttons was meager at best. Still, the shopper ahead of me at checkout left with a cart crammed full of $1,500 worth of fabric anyway.

In a direct affront to my entire bloodline, I’m not great at sewing. My stitches are sloppy, my seams are haphazard, I no longer remember how to use a sewing machine, and I’ve been trying to knit the same pair of mittens since before the pandemic.

But I love it anyway. Joann’s was my happy place and losing it breaks my heart a little.

I needed a new happy place.

Knit & Bolt is a place customers come for fun fabrics, natural fiber yarns and craft kits, or to enroll in a crowded calendar of how-to craft classes. As Saturday’s skirt lesson wrapped up, the next instructor arrived to set up for a lesson in crumb quilting.

Will losing Joann’s help local fabric shops? Yes and no, said owner Megan Boesen.

The bad news is that neighborhood shops can’t match the inventory or the prices of a fabric superstore. A project that once meant a quick trip to Joann’s might turn into a multi-store trek in search of supplies.

“We’re only so big, we can only carry so much,” Boesen said, waving a hand around the cheery, colorful shop, which occupies a fraction of the floor space of your average Joann’s. “We don’t have buttons or zippers. Joann’s had a place for bigger notions and making tools. The things us smaller guys can’t carry.”

If Joann’s customers do start shopping closer to home, it would be good for business — and great for any customers who haven’t met the rest of Minnesota’s crafting community.

“You really get a very giving and wonderful community when you’re working in the world of crafting,” Boesen said. With more people getting to know their neighborhood fabric shops, “that community is going to grow.”

If visiting a series of unique shops and supporting local business is your idea of a good time, the knitters of the Twin Cities will be doing just that next month.

A dozen yarn shops are banding together for the Minnesota Yarn Shop Hop to encourage customers to find out just how many amazing shops are out there. From April 3-6, customers can try to swing by every yarn shop in the metro, collecting free patterns, trying for prizes, and raising money for local food shelves.

Nothing makes Boesen and her staff happier than when a customer who bought materials for a project at Knit & Bolt brings the finished product back to show them what they made. But getting started on a project can be intimidating, especially when you don’t know how to sew or knit or crochet or quilt. Which brings us back to Lynn Barbeau, her classmates and how to sew a skirt.

“If I can learn to do this at my age, anybody can,” Barbeau joked. “You’re supporting a local business, you’re learning a new skill, and it’s in a good space.”

Beside her, Catherine Menick was upcycling some soft and comfy, but torn, bedsheets into a new skirt.

“I really firmly believe that when you use your hands to create something, it makes you feel connected” to the garment, she said, “in a way that you would never get if you just picked something off a rack.”

Menick knew how to sew, but also knew when to sign up for a class and get a little extra help.

“I think it speaks to the culture we live in, where if you’re not amazing at something, you’re not good,” Menick said. “But that’s not the craft culture community. It’s supportive and accepting and open — everything you need to be successful.”

Everyone who’s knit, purled, carved, glued or sewn remembers a time when they didn’t know how.

“We’ve all been beginners at something,” Menick said. “There will be people to support you. People are kind.”

For more information about the Minnesota Yarn Shop Hop, visit minnesotayarnshophop.com.