Can a Yarn Store Be a Place of Healing?

Unlike so many small businesses, Downtown Yarns, Leti Ruiz’s yarn store in New York’s East Village, managed to make it through the pandemic intact. A surge in interest in crafting — including knitting and crocheting, the store’s specialties — brought both returning and new customers in search of comfort and distraction. When people were stuck at home, patrons placed orders over the phone or through Instagram and a friend of the store made deliveries to all five boroughs. In the end, the store actually fared better financially in 2020, Ms. Ruiz said, than it had in 2019.

Now, however, Ms. Ruiz is facing a new landscape: the unknown world of post-pandemic crafting. “It’s sort of slowed down because people are going back to work or they’re traveling,” she said. “So I feel like now it’s more like regular times.”

For many, crafting emerged during the pandemic as an essential way to reduce anxiety and turn feelings of ambient restlessness into something soothing and productive. Andrea Deal, the co-owner of Gotham Quilts in Midtown Manhattan, described a frenzy at the beginning of the pandemic in which her store’s normal sales of sewing machines tripled. The swell wasn’t just about keeping idle hands occupied, she said. It’s a reflection of how people were rethinking their lives during isolation.

“We’re seeing low-wage workers not wanting to go back to their jobs. They realize, ‘I’m more important than this and I want to be doing something more worthwhile,’” Ms. Deal said. “Being able to create something yourself and be creative and produce something useful, either for yourself or for someone else, I think there’s a huge amount of satisfaction in that.”

‘When you’re sort of frightened of going out, you knit more.’

As stress and uncertainty about the future starts to diminish, however, even just a little — due largely to the availability of vaccines and the lifting of pandemic restrictions — it’s unclear what role crafting will continue to play in the lives of those who adopted it as a stress relief measure during an extraordinarily trying year.