String Thing Studio: A Place For Knitting And Healing In Park Slope
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – String Thing Studio is not your grandmother's yarn shop.
"It's probably you, your grandmother, and your 10-year-old niece's yarn shop," owner Felicia Eve said. "We have attorneys. We have doctors. We have police officers."
Felicia never imagined she'd weave a career out of yarn.
A podiatrist, she practiced for about a decade. But when her mother Sharon Thomas died in 2015, the grief was overwhelming.
"I think I was kind of numb. But I knit the whole time through that. That was kind of my life preserver. I would get up, I would get my kids off to school, and I would sit on the couch and knit. If I did nothing else, I would sit on that couch, and I would knit. And then, a friend of mine said to me one day, 'You need something. You need something to kind of pull you out of this funk. Your mom wouldn't want you doing that.' And she was right," she said.
String Thing became that something.
Coincidentally, the shop bears the same initials as her late mother.
"She is in every stitch of everything in here," Felicia said.
For Felicia, knitting is a gateway to healing.
"It's meditative. It's prayerful," she said. "I love the click of my needles. I love how the yarn slides through my hands."
She's a believer in its calming effects.
"From a physician's point of view, it produces a hormone that is very soothing for people. So the pandemic has produced so many new knitters and crocheters and needle felters and you name it," she said. "People use it as that, to be able to express that communal suffering and longing that we all have right now."
Before the pandemic, classes and events at the shop forged strong bonds within her knitting community. But even in the era of social distancing, first-time visitors often walk out with new friends.
"I just feel really proud that this space has become that type of gathering space for people," she said. "They feel like home when they come here."
String Thing Studio
54 7th Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11217
(929) 337-6130
https://www.stringthingstudio.com/
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