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Yardgoods Celebrates Sixtieth Anniversary
1949 was the year that Edward and Beatrice Vlodek opened the Yardgoods Center of Waterville on Silver Street. He was from Bridgeport, Connecticut, she from Compton, Quebec and they had chosen Waterville because her sister owned a similar shop in Rumford where they were living, and because a fabric shop had just closed in Waterville. The new store carried fabrics, yarns, plastics, laces and notions — a limited inventory, compensated by the Vlodek's willingness to special order products their customers needed. "My Mom was the business aspect and my father the sales," says Joyce Vlodek Atkins, who has worked in the business since she was five, especially on Sundays when the family changed the windows after church and dinner. "Father was the personality, mother the bookkeeper. They were married fifty years," Joyce describes. Edward has passed away but Bea, at 87, works three days a week, goes to exercise class three days a week, lives independently, and is "still a perfectionist." In 1956 Yardgoods moved to Main Street to two floors of retail space that would also accommodate a thriving drapery, slipcover and upholstery addition to their business. Yardgoods was becoming a true family business as both Joyce and her brother Kenneth worked increasingly with their parents. In 1969 Yardgoods moved to the current location in Waterville's Downtown Shopping Center. Here, the inventory is impressive. Countless shelves of yarn, fabrics, sewing notions, finished products, patterns and stamps greet customers who flock to the store in search of the unique and the familiar, drive from far away and range in age from 4 to 102. "There's something for everyone," Joyce says of the inventory. In yarns there are incredible colors, built-in designs, and unusual materials such as yarns made out of ground shells. Stamping, which started about 16 years ago, has an ever expanding array of designs and techniques. What's hot now are punches. A major attraction at Yardgoods are the classes — up to seven sessions of knitting a week and a full schedule of stamping. "It's therapy," Joyce says of the classes, and of all the sewing and knitting and needlework and stamping that Yardgoods has to offer, adding, "They come here for the friendliness." Just as they have for 60 years. | ||
