At our last writing here, we encouraged folks impatient for spring to pay a visit to Knight's Quilt Shop on Route 1 North.
There, it's impossible not to be cheered by bright colors everywhere, and to feel - surrounded, as you are, by fabrics destined to "comfort," and by a staff eager to help - in some sense, very much "at home."
The force behind it all is founder and owner Michelle Knight.
We sat down this week to talk with Michelle about the shop's origins, and came away with one of those stories that goes way back in years, revealing events strangely unfolding as if predestined to yield current results.
Knight's Quilt Shop, for example, could be said to have some of its origins in Michelle's mother's medical service as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in Wiesbaden, Germany, at the end of the Second World War.
There, she'd become friends with a 10-year-old German boy, though she didn't speak German and he didn't speak English. Somehow the two surmounted that obstacle to keep up a correspondence that endured for close to 30 years, when the German, by then married and with two daughters, invited Michelle's mother to Germany to visit.
That was in 1972.
Michelle, born in Southbridge, Mass., but brought up, from age 4, in Louisiana following her parents' divorce, earned a degree in elementary education that year from Northwestern State University in Louisiana, and decided to accompany her mother on the German trip.
Michelle would end up remaining in Germany for a year and working, during that time, in Frankfort's American Express Bank.
When she returned to the States and decided to settle near where her mother had settled, at York Beach, she got a job in - what else? - banking. She would then end up working at the Maine National Bank in Ogunquit for 11 years, advancing in position from teller to, eventually, operations manager.
And she would meet a customer there, Perkins Cove lobsterman Richard Knight, Jr., and marry him, in 1981.
Michelle's and Rick's two children, Richard, III, ("Ricky") and John, were born three years apart, and, with Ricky's arrival first, in 1983, Michelle became a stay-at-home mom. But that was also the year when, starting with an adult education course at York High School, she took up quilting. And then, of course, like other quilters, she became, as she put it, "addicted," fashioning quilt after quilt "for friends and family."
About 1989, Michelle went back to work at Barnacle Billy's, Etc., in Ogunquit, serving there as a cashier, nights and in season, for seven years. Meanwhile, as the boys entered school, she also became active in York school affairs: she substitute taught; she served for three years as president of the Parent and Teacher Program at Coastal Ridge Elementary School, and for two years as secretary of York Little League Baseball; she was an active high school volunteer and a mentor for the York Police Department's Jump Start program.
Along the way, she also became a Level II Reiki practitioner, and, until she opened her shop, a York Hospice volunteer.
Out of all this experience came a dream, plus the know-how, to own her own business - and to shape it around fabrics and quilting.
The move toward it started in 1992, when she cut a little photo out of "Country Living" magazine. The photo, not much bigger than the palm of your hand and now wrinkled and tattered at the edges, is today pinned to a bulletin board above Michelle's desk, and she took it down from there to show it to us. It depicts, from the front and in color, a building that looks, save for its log siding, exactly like Knight's Quilt Shop.
Seven years would pass before Michelle could turn the image in that photo into a reality. In 1997, her husband's uncle, John Weare, made a big contribution to that process by donating 40 acres of land to the Knights; her own efforts would include drawing up a 30-page business plan, then personally shepherding contractors and all others involved through a challenging applications and building process.
She opened the doors to Knight's Quilt Shop in June of 1999.
When we asked Michelle if there had been major hurdles or surprises both then and since, she reported that there had been but she declined to dwell on them and offered, instead, a philosophy we thought worth taking to heart. "I never focus on the problem," she said. "I always focus on the solution. Because you can't go back five minutes. You can only go forward."
She also volunteered this: "Owning my own business was never about the money. It was about being self-employed, about making decisions and about providing a great atmosphere for everyone to work in."
Corporate America, take note!
Ignorant about the very existence of quilt shops, we asked what there was for competition, and Michelle said that she has three competitors between 30 and 40 minutes away but quickly added, "I never worry about that. I feel competition is healthy."
Indeed, we learned, quilt shops and others with related interests within a traveling radius of about 90 minutes pool their interests four times a year to sponsor "shop hops" - occasions lasting four days or more in which visitors buy a "passport," then carpool or bus together to all or some of, say, nine shops, where they get those passports stamped. The passports are then pooled for a drawing yielding prizes - a sewing machine, for example, or gift coupons.
"Shop hops get people out to see new shops," Michelle said, and she reported that those in which she engages typically draw between 200 and 450 participants.
When we asked about what made her shop unique, we learned that not only was it the HUGE variety and extent of her inventory - 4,000-plus bolts of different materials, for example, and over 500 books, plus every quilting accoutrement imaginable - but, and most importantly in Michelle's eyes, customer service.
"We help people," she stressed. "That's my philosophy - and that of all the girls who work here, too. We're helpers."
And, because, as she put it, "There are no quilt police - nobody to arrest you if your points don't match up perfectly," the help comes "without making people feel intimidated. We celebrate their accomplishment."
The "help" extends to providing coloring books for children who might be tagging along with their moms, and places for husbands, who are often also tagging along. (We regretted not asking if husbands ever become quilters themselves.)
In the same spirit of helping is a feature definitely unique to Knight's: the provision of quilts made by Knight's customers to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit of the Barbara Bush Children's Hospital at the Maine Medical Center in Portland. Michelle calls the generosity of the customers who've contributed to this project - some of them tourists from far away - "overwhelming," as she states, emphatically, "Quilters are givers." Some 80 more of those quilts were delivered to the hospital just this past week, on March 18.
Generous with credit, Michelle listed for us the names of her staff: Carolann Keyser, who will have been with her for eight years this August; Pam Gerald, with her for six years in May; newcomer Cheryl Laplante (whom we featured here earlier); and part-timers Dianne Aguiar and Nora Bailey, who've both been on board for one year.
"Nothing is more overrated than natural childbirth and owning your own business" reads a plaque hanging above Michelle's desk. She showed it to us with a chuckle before we left, but said of her job, "I love it. I couldn't be happier."
Look for a book she's now writing about this business-building experience. It has the potential to be a gift rivaling that of spring itself.
