“We started the store because we wanted to see a kitchen store in Kerrytown,” Tom Hollander recalls.
The kitchen was already in there, courtesy of Mary Campbell’s short-lived experimental restaurant/classroom/kitchen store, Everyday Cook. Hollander’s Kitchen & Home lasted longer, but it, too, will close–probably toward the end of May.
Tom and his wife, Cindy, got the store up and running in 2009, but their hope, from the very beginning, was that someone else would step up to the plate and buy, or at least manage, it for them. Instead, he says, “It was a revolving door. Every time someone left, we’d have to train a new manager. There are only so many hours in the day, and we had too much going on” in their paper-and-card store downstairs.
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Knit A Round will close when the lease is up at the end of June or hopefully before, says co-owner Carrie Pozza. The knitting and yarn shop opened in Traver Village in 2001. Pozza says the rumors that it was done in by the Internet are not at all true–she and her partner, Sheri Preketes, are just ready to retire.
Pozza says Preketes’ husband “retired four years ago, and it’s been hard to keep her down.” Pozza, too, is ready to move on. She’s heading to Key West–“as good a place as any to start over.” She went there for the first time last March and “fell in love with the place. I’ve been back three times since,” she said, as she worked on an ocean-colored cotton throw.
She does admit that the Internet changed the yarn shop business, but she and Preketes found ways to roll with the punches. “We stopped buying patterns and books,” mostly because of Ravelry, which she describes as “Facebook for knitters.” “But people still want to feel and see yarn, and they get inspired by projects they see on display.”
There will be an all-day “wake” on May 1. “People will bring things they’ve made”–knitted things, she means, although “one lady said she’s bringing libations.”
