Karen Kendrick-Hands would rather be knitting.
Kendrick-Hands is the owner of City Knits, a specialty yarn shop in the basement of the Fisher Building. She put her environmental law career on hold to open up the store two years ago, something she'd been "threatening to do for years, decades," she says, and hasn’t looked back since.
In fact, most days it's hard to catch her not knitting.
She doesn't stop once during an hour-long interview at the store. Speaking softly, Kendrick-Hands allows her words to fade at the end, almost as if she's folding them along with the needle into each delicate stitch of a salmon scarf with ribbon detail.
"I hope it doesn't bother you that my hands are busy," she says. "Some days I can do two things at once." Indeed, it would be enough just to have opened the store, providing much needed retail to Detroit residents and workers, especially since the seemingly conventional wisdom among many in the business community is that one might get more traffic in a busy suburban strip mall.
But the location Kendricks-Hands chose for City Knits allows her to cater to and connect with a more diverse community. "Because we are in Detroit, we service a really broad base of customers," she says. "Color is important. We take care of the needs of the whole rainbow of skin tones. We get to carry wonderful, bright colors. One of the first things I focused on was putting together a palette of color that suited the major demographic in Detroit." And her stock is of such high quality, and features so many lush, plush, colorful and frilly, hard-to-find items, that it has become a regional draw, bringing crafters from all over Metro Detroit into the city. She estimates that about 60 percent of her mailing list includes non-city zip codes. Fisher Theatre-goers often stop in at the shop and actors in long-term productions (Mia Farrow to name one) have become fans as well.
"I heard a woman leaving (the Fisher Building) one day, saying, 'Wow, there's a knit shop here. Let's buy the series next year because we want to go to the knit shop.' The theater brings me a lot of business, and maybe I bring them a little in return," she says, with a wink.
A Moment in Color
Kendrick-Hands is particular about what she carries, partly because of her experience as an attorney. "I know what some people will put on the dollar value of an hour of my time," she says.
"I want to use materials that are worth my time. I can't compete with the volume and price point of a chain store. And I don't particularly want to put that kind of merchandise in when there's so much really fabulous, beautiful yarn that just invites you to feel it, invites you to sit down and create something with it."
Some customers have claimed the store has changed their lives. "They'll say that we've been here when they needed us," Kendrick-Hands says.
"I remember one woman who was on her way to chemo (at Henry Ford Hospital, just down the street), and she said, 'I just couldn't go through that again without stopping for a moment in the color.' People say we've provided them an outlet, a safe place."
But offering much-needed retail, a safe place and drawing attention (and bodies) to the city isn't enough for Kendrick-Hands. The woman's got plans.
"I want to bring knitting back to Detroit," she says.
Not just because it's good for business – because it's good for the community. Worldwide and local turmoil and violence have renewed interest in "nesting" activities like knitting and crocheting because of their meditative, relaxing and comforting properties. And knitting circles and classes such as those offered at City Knits are an additional outlet for community building and airing out problems, hence the growing popularity of "stitch and bitch" groups.
"It's getting people to sit down together and find that they have something in common," Kendrick-Hands says. "There are people you end up taking a class with that you'd never otherwise interact with."
One crucial way she and the store are helping to create and foster better connections between individuals within the Detroit community is through projects such as "Community Cast-on: A Knitting Circle," a piece conceived by Lisa Whiting, an assistant manager at the store, a beginning knitting instructor and a 2005 graduate of the College for Creative Studies.
"The piece is meant to be knit at the same time by eight people," Whiting explains, squeezing the circular soft sculpture of zigzag earth tones with 16 knitting needles piercing through the center like candles on a birthday cake. "The premise behind it is the ability to sit down next to somebody regardless of who they are or where they came from or what they look like and make something beautiful. It's mostly about community. Everybody's working together to make a piece of art. It's a performance piece, really."
The piece was "cast on" at Comerica TasteFest, and, since then, has traveled to the Apple Tree Lane craft fair in Clare, then back to Detroit for the Woodbridge Summer Festival, the New Center Farbman Group picnic and the Michigan State Fair.
Crafting is also important because "humans love stuff,” Kendrick-Hands says. “Especially, humans seem to love to create stuff. We've got a desire to make things and be creative and leave some kind of physical evidence behind that we've been here. And this shop focuses on nurturing that creative urge."
Stitching a Fabric of Community
Her biggest goal of all, perhaps, a theme that surfaces over and over throughout the interview, is that she just wants people to sit down next to each other.
To that end, she has woven together her twin passions for knitting and advocating for effective, available public transit.
If she's not performing first aid on a customer's scarf-gone-wrong, putting together a kit in the store or teaching a class, she often can be found knitting in the back of a Transportation Riders United (TRU) policy meeting. She was president of the nonprofit organization, which encourages effective regional transit, but she resigned after opening City Knits, which takes up most of her creative energy these days. Now she sits on the board and remains active with the group she helped start with her son, Stephen Hands, partly because, instead of driving, she'd rather be riding public transit – knitting.
"Bad transit exacts a tax from everyone," she says. "It taxes the time if you can afford a car. And if you can't, and you have to spend hours and hours waiting for the bus. Every hour someone stands at the bus stop waiting to get a ride to their minimum wage job is an hour they're not spending going over their kid's homework, going to a community meeting, working in their garden. Their time is sucked away for transportation needs.”
"People who say, 'It's cheaper to buy a house far out in the suburbs,' well, they're not factoring into that the cost of driving and time spent on that."
The time spent not knitting?
"People who knit know what their time is worth," she says.
Whether on public transit, in a knitting circle or at a community event, the conversation-starter is an easy one, a "pick-up line" heard often while perusing the shelves and shelves of colorful yarn, books and buttons at City Knits:
"You knit?"
Sure, why knot?
Links:
Community Cast-On: The project continues at Dally in the Alley, Sept. 10. It finishes up at Bind-Off Day at the DIA on Sept. 17. Pictures documenting the project will be posted at www.communitycaston.blogspot.com.
City Knits is in the basement of the Fisher Building, 3011 W. Grand Blvd., in Suite C-9. Call 313-872-9665 or go to www.cityknits.com.
Transportation Riders United: http://www.detroittransit.org/
All photographs copyright Dave Krieger