Spinners meet up at Hook a Frog Yarn Shop in Madison, Alabama, before COVID-19. This year, the shop is looking forward to participating in Local Yarn Store day again, despite delays.
When The National NeedleArts Association (TNNA) announced in April that it would be suspending operations, local yarn shop owners may have assumed that one of the organization’s premier events, Local Yarn Store Day, would be coming to an end. The good news is this isn’t the case. LYS Day is happening again in 2020 and an organizing committee is hard at work creating an exciting event that will work for shop owners operating under current COVID-19 conditions.
Courtney Kelley of Kelbourne Woolens, the last president of TNNA, explains that LYS Day is owned by TNNA and this year’s volunteer organizing committee is being chaired by Oz Barron of Cambria Yarn in Cambria, California. The event has been postponed from the original date of April 25 to the new date of September 12.
“Local Yarn Store Day was created as a way to show the strength of the local yarn store and the wonderful relationships with our vendor partners. E-commerce gets all the press, but the overwhelming majority of sales go through our local brick-and-mortar yarn shops,” says Barron.
“While this year is full of uncertainty on many levels, we have no intention of letting Local Yarn Store Day go away.”
According to the LYS Day website: “LYS Day has brought thousands of ‘yarnies’ from across the US and Canada to go to their local shop to see the exclusive, unique products created specifically for LYS Day. Think of it as a nationwide Yarn Crawl!”
Teresa Harris, owner of Hook a Frog Fiber and Fun, a yarn shop in Madison, Alabama, is excited to be participating in this year’s event. “LYS Day is a celebration having a local shop for the fiber community,” she says. “The ability to promote items that are exclusive to the LYS Day is a wonderful way to bring customers into the local stores and remind them of what an LYS has to offer them.”
Shops that would like to participate in this year’s LYS Day should email Barron at info@cambriayarn.com. Participating shops will be listed on this page on the LYS Day website where they can link to their online storefronts and list any virtual events they’ll be hosting.