I took a couple weeks off from life in general for a vacation. That’s a good thing, to recharge and refresh, and I also took a couple weeks off of posting on the blog for the same reasons. I’ve been posting regularly for a year and I need to recharge and refresh for the coming year.

The vacation was lovely – a river cruise on the Rhine and Mosel Rivers, starting in Amsterdam but spending most of our time in Germany. The trip gave lots of opportunities to stop in little towns, exploring their old town and shopping areas.

I go to Germany regularly, and over the years one of my favorite things to do is to seek out shops for makers: wool shops, fabric shops, embroidery shops. Back in the 70’s and 80’s the stores were common in most towns. I loved seeing the difference in craft styles in each area, and see what people were focused on. I distinctly remember in 1996 when my favorite shop in Salzburg, Austria put patchwork quilting in their shop window – I was so excited.

The recent years have not been kind to the crafting store. In 2010, I went back to Salzburg and was disappointed to learn that the big fabric store I loved so much was closed. The lady I talked to in the button shop (yes a whole shop devoted to nothing but buttons and closures) lamented the fact that young people didn’t do much and the shops were closing.

This trip, in three different villages, I found yarn shops that were either closing or had recently closed and were just trying to sell off inventory in a neighboring shop. In Cochem, I had a lovely chat with the lady who ran the yarn shop there. The shop had been in the same location for over 125 years (the cover photo for this post shows the ornate iron sign in the shape of a skein of yarn that hangs over the store). She motioned around the tiny space and noted that the real estate was getting more and more expensive, while she did not have the space to carry a lot of inventory. She noted that most of her customers now buy yarn on line because they can find anything they want at their fingertips on the keyboard. I told her we were seeing a similar trend in the United States – rising shop rents and the ability of the internet to provide so much inventory that physical shops are closing down.

I understand that there is a rhythm to all things, and I know that I actually shop on line for a lot of stuff, especially yarn. It is so easy to sit in my big chair in the living room and browse through color ways. I am familiar with the brands of yarn that I like and I know what the quality is, and photos are good enough on my iPad that I can be confident of the colors that I’m purchasing. I know that every time I buy on line, I’m contributing to the push for on line sales, but at the same time, I don’t have a lot of local shops from which to choose.

I don’t have any answers, but I was saddened as I left the little shop and stepped back out onto the crowded street. My love for visiting craft stores in foreign countries is getting more and more difficult to enjoy. We stopped in Cologne where there is a lovely patchwork shop (in Europe, quilting is called patchwork) but it was well outside of the city center, and without a car, I was not able to get out there (a taxi ride would have been extremely expensive). A way of life is changing and it saddens me to see it go.