Petersburg is home to skilled quilters, knitters, and other textile artists, but it’s been years since the island town had a dedicated craft store. That changed on Wednesday, May 6, when Olivia Martinsen opened Tangled Thread.
The bright, colorful craft store is tucked into the first floor of the Petersburg Indian Association’s Hallingstad-Peratrovich building. Martinsen has a little bit of everything: yarn, fabric, embroidery supplies, weaving materials, felting options, and lots of crafty tools.
She said the store came out of her love of crafting.
“I am an avid crocheter, and I wanted to have yarn available. And then my grandmother is an avid quilter,” she said. “So then yarn turned into yarn and fabric, and then I started ordering stuff, and it turned into all sorts of fiber arts.”
This isn’t Martinsen’s first foray into being a business owner, she also has her own legal practice.
“The legal world is rough in all the ways that you could predict it to be,” she said. “And so I was doing a lot of crochet in my off time, and I thought, ‘Well, why don’t I make that also be part of my business world as well?’”
Members of Petersburg’s quilting guild say it makes a difference to have a place in town to shop for supplies. Petersburg’s hardware store has some craft options, but it’s a limited selection. Many crafters will choose to stuff their suitcases full of supplies when they travel, or buy online.
The quilters said they’ve built great relationships with other Alaska fabric stores that will ship to town, but Sally Dwyer said buying online can make it hard to know if you’re getting the right color.
“For a project I’m working on at home, I needed three greens that graduated nicely from pretty light to pretty dark,” she said. “But when you’ve got 500 greens in front of you, how do you know which one you’re picking without being there?”
Quilter Susan Holmes said nothing beats being able to actually touch a fabric and feel the quality in person.
She said it’s exciting to have a place that so many crafters in the community can go to without having to wait.
“Maybe you stop a project because you don’t have the floss, or maybe you’re a knitter, or you’re a crocheter, and you just don’t have the colors,” she said. “So to know that there’s now another place to go and look to check to see if the supplies you need would be there, I mean that in itself is exciting!”
While neither quilter had visited Tangled Thread yet, they said they’re happy to have the space in town.
