Photo by Sydney Cromwell.
Shop volunteers and regulars chat as they work on their knitting projects at Knit Happenz.
Behind every great craftsperson, there’s that disastrous project she wishes she could forget.
Vestavia Hills resident Holly Tenison said her mother, Memory Hagler, had just such a project in her early years of knitting: an attempted red, white and blue sweater Tenison estimates was about eight feet wide.
“Oh, boy, they were disasters,” Tenison said of her mother’s first attempts.
Now, after a lot more experience, Hagler could be considered a master of knitting — and Tenison, too.
Hagler opened her own yarn shop in Vestavia 31 years ago, and her daughter continues to run the store, now called Knit Happenz at Memory Hagler Knitting.
Inside the store at 2126 Columbiana Road, the walls are almost completely hidden by shelves of brightly colored yarn and shirts, blankets, socks and other finished projects to give curious shoppers a few ideas.
Tenison said she picks a variety of yarns based on textures, colors and personal preference, with much more selection than the average craft store. Along with traditional wool or acrylic yarns, she stocks skeins of more unusual origins, such as bamboo, corn, alpaca, mink, recycled jeans and even milk.
“You’ll get hooked because the yarns are just so different, and it’s so much more fun,” Tenison said.
More so than the yarn selection, Tenison said Knit Happenz sets itself apart from other craft stores by the people inside. At any time there are volunteers and regular visitors scattered across the tables and couches in the store, needles clicking away as they talk. The store policy is “everybody helps everybody.”
“Most people will say it’s more like a club than it is like a business,” Tenison said. “There’s a lot of therapy that goes on around here. To be honest, a lot of us need our knitting to make it through the day.”
While Knit Happenz does host classes for advanced techniques, Tenison said she’s seen plenty of customers teaching each other and fixing mistakes. Her mother continues to visit the store but purely to enjoy friends rather than to run the business.
Knitting continues to be a female-driven hobby, Tenison said, but she has a few regular male customers. It is also drawing an increasingly younger audience, with teens and college students hanging out in the shop just like senior citizens.
“I love looking around and seeing multigenerational, all races, people from all over the world coming together and just being together because they share the knitting bug — or crocheting bug,” she said.
With loyal customers, some of whom have been coming for decades, Tenison said she frequently knows all about their lives, and they know all about hers. When her family went on a mission trip, volunteers stepped up to keep the store running while she was gone.
“We know just about everything about everybody that comes in,” she said.
Tenison began knitting when she was about 11 years old, when her mother learned how to knit much more successfully. Tenison said she wanted her mother to make her several sweaters, but instead she was handed knitting needles and told to learn.
If she learned to knit, Hagler told her, she would buy her daughter whatever yarn she chose.
“Well, that was a mistake because I not only learned, I started knitting like a crazy fool,” Tenison said. “I got into the business because I wanted all those sweaters, and she wasn’t going to knit them for me.”
Now Tenison can see pictures of clothes she likes and figure out a pattern to recreate them for a lot less money and a lot more fun, she said.
Knit Happenz wasn’t the original career plan for Tenison. She worked in special education, particularly with infants and toddlers. But when Hagler wanted to retire from running the store, she and shop regulars convinced Tenison to take the reins.
Having managed the store for eight years, Tenison said she has seen that knitting and crocheting are about so much more than the yarn.
“A lot of times we’re knitting, not for the outcome, but it’s for the community, for the relaxation,” Tenison said.
