Dancing Beads - Medford, Oregon

Location: Medford, Oregon
Shop:       Dancing Beads
Owner:    Carol
Website:  www.dancingbeads.com/

Medford has 70,000 folks and only one bead shop. Carol actually closed Dancing Beads a couple of years ago, thinking she was done with the bead store. She tried a couple of other things, including writing HTML and helping with web sites, but she soon found that she really enjoyed playing with her beads and cats more. Carol felt she needed to take her "office" out of her home environment which was too distracting (all those beads, and that cat), so she went searching for an office space. She found a spot in her neighborhood in a home that had been converted to retail/office space. As she was getting a feel for the place, she says a voice popped into her head 'This is going to be my new beadshop', and she answered back 'that's funny, I didn't know I was going to open another bead shop'.

She still had a lot of stock from the store she had closed a couple years back, so she opened up another bead shop. She had a lot of her old customers come back relieved that she decided to do it again, and she's gained new customers as well.

They've got a great selection of classes, and the class size is usually limited to six people, which makes it easy to get some one-on-one with the instructor. I was impressed that for a small(ish) bead shop, they've found some great ways of displaying a lot of merchandise.

Medford is located just north of California on I-5, worth a layover if you're passing through.

Next stop: Portland, Oregon.

Middleford Yarn & Stitchery - Medford, Oregon

Location: Medford, Oregon
Shop:       Middleford Yarn & Stitchery Shoppe
Owner:    Sonja
Website: www.miyarn.com/

Medford is in southern Oregon just north of Ashland on I-5. 70,000 people live in this sunny valley. It's location between two mountain ranges, the Siskiyous and the Cascades, allows the rain that permeates the pacific northwest to bypass Medford. On average, they get 180 more days of sun  than Seattle. That's half a year. Kinda depressing when you think about it.

Sonja has a lot of things on her plate. She does custom upholstery, runs a furniture shop, has the yarn shop (which includes counted cross-stitch), plus she offers individual lessons, and all under one roof.

She's been doing upholstery for 20 years in Medford, the yarn shop came 10 years later. She says she's addicted to both hobbies. She even makes most of the samples adorning the furniture in the show room, like the bed in the middle above.

Another store with lots of inspiring samples. According to Sonja, the key to having your store samples not take over your back room is to make only things she likes and that fit her. That's smart, I think.

Her shop has a 'Stitch-In' on Thursday nights, a 'Help Time' on Wednesdays as well as the weekends as long as they're not too busy, plus they have 'Social Stitch' all day on the weekends. That's the knitting schedule, there's also things happening for the cross-stitchers, check the website if you're interested.