It may not be surprising to local yarn enthusiasts that the Longmont Yarn Shoppe’s story began with alpacas.
“My sister bought three pregnant alpacas,” says Gail Sundberg-Douse. “She said, ‘I don’t know what to do with this stuff that I just had sheared off of them.’” Gail didn’t know, either, as she had only ever used finished yarn and roving. “We had to figure out how to meet in the middle.”
Gail Sundberg-Douse traveling with patrons of the Longmont Yarn Shoppe in Scotland.
Gail, by many measures, is a lifelong Longmont resident. She grew up in Longmont on Crestridge Lane and attended St. Vrain Valley schools. Her grandfather, father, and sister all worked for Red Wing Shoes, but she had other plans. After receiving a nursing degree from the University of Northern Colorado, she and her then partner returned to Longmont, eventually settling in her historic Westside home.
Gail worked as a nurse at Longmont United Hospital for more than 20 years, then a telephonic nurse from home while teaching knitting classes through the Longmont Recreation Center.
“I’d have to get yarn and needles to take to the students. And I would think, ‘Gosh, how do I source this stuff?’” she says.
Her ingenuity kicked in and she opened a wholesale account, selling items to her students. This in turn helped her sell her sister’s yarn at Alpaca shows and other events. “It was just like a cascade of things,” she says.
Gail was practically selling yarn out of the back of her car when she came into some seed money.
“Our folks were getting together at Panera coffee shops and knitting warm things for the homeless,” she says. “We really needed a place that didn’t close at 9 o’clock or where we had to buy coffee in order to sit and be together.”
In 2012, the Longmont Yarn Shoppe originated in the back of its current location. When the group swelled, Gail took over the entire store around 2017 and eventually Mark and Gail purchased the building.
Not even a global pandemic could unravel the energy Gail had knitted together.
“Everybody was looking for something to do. But so were all these amazing instructors,” says Mark of the Yarn Shoppe’s pivot to Zoom. Gail enlisted a well-known instructor from Amsterdam and registered more than 300 people for an online class. The concept took off. And once travel resumed, so did guided trips overseas with Gail (she most recently took students to Iceland and this spring will travel with a group to Greece).
The time had come, however, to find the next steward for the store, and Dianna Judge was the perfect person to do so, according to Gail.
“She said the Longmont Yarn Shoppe was the blueprint of the yarn store she always wanted to open herself.”
Since her retirement, Gail has mostly given herself time and space away from the store, intent on letting the new owner make it her own. Nevertheless, the mission that started it all finds its way back to Gail.
“I went in last week and said, ‘Help me decide which buttons look best for this sweater I knit,’” says Gail. With a gentle laugh she adds, “I might go down there today. I need a cable for a project I’m working on.”
Images from left: Gail Sundberg-Douse at Inch Beach in Ireland, where she hosted a trip through The Yarn Shoppe (Photograph courtesy of Gail Sundeberg-Douse). A wall full of yarn at The Yarn Shopped (Photograph courtesy of The Yarn Shoppe).