Needlepoint shop stitches together a community

Laura Stonecipher, a 28-year-old insurance account manager from Chicago, came to Philadelphia a few weeks ago on business. In the cab from the airport to her hotel, she passed the corner of 18th and Chestnut Streets and noticed a wave of script flowing across the wide glass windows: "Rittenhouse Needlepoint, instruction, coffee, conversation."

Stonecipher's pulse quickened just a little.

If she'd been a granny with a thing for stitching Home Sweet Home samplers, her fluttering heart might have been easier to understand. On the happening continuum, needlepoint has long occupied the same camphor-scented niche as carding wool and sarsaparilla socials.

Until now.

After work the following day, she headed straight for the shop, where a tan, blond, middle-age man in wire-rimmed glasses, country club plaid shorts, a polo shirt, and Topsiders greeted her:

"Welcome! Come in. Look around."

"Oh," she recalled thinking as she scanned the place, with its needlepoint flip-flops and needlepoint patterns for mezuzahs and Burberry watchbands all for sale. "Finally!"

It's nearly a year since Russell Palmer and Stephen Janick found this space and decided to open a chic needlepoint store unlike any they had ever seen.

"At the risk of breaking my arm patting myself on the back, we've made something semi-special here," Palmer said.

Even as other businesses on Chestnut are shutting down, unable to cope with the recession, Rittenhouse Needlepoint is thriving.

"We're doing five to six times our first year's goals," Palmer said. "The economy actually has helped us. Not to be too yoga-ish about this, but when people are depressed, they like to create. In a bad economy, crafts businesses do well. People nest more. They don't go to Hawaii. And during car trips, they like to do needlepoint."

Over to one side of the shop, two women on overstuffed couches sat chatting and stitching. At their feet, Lulu, a black standard poodle with impeccable manners, curled up on the rug. The walls are draped with loops of thread, thousands of them, in every color, gradation, and texture. Ultraviolet silk, rosy cashmere, fuzzy caterpillar black alpaca, metallic bronze-flecked synthetics. A steaming pot of tea had been placed on a long wooden dining table where Janick was teaching a class on how to do the basket stitch.

"Didn't we have grapes?" Palmer asked, putting together snacks for a visitor.

"Yes, but I think we ate them," said Janick, who then turned back to his student, a special-education teacher from Berwyn, examined her work and proclaimed, "You definitely have the hang of it!"

In the 23 peripatetic years that Palmer and Janick have been together, they have run a series of successful businesses. They met when they were in college. Janick studied history at Haverford. Palmer studied business at Drexel. In the summer of 1988, they started their first joint venture: a European-style sidewalk flower cart on Rittenhouse Square.

By the close of the first day, they had landed 13 accounts with nearby stores, including Laura Ashley and Jaeger. Over the next four years, they expanded to two shops, regularly provided flower arrangements for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and operated a professional landscaping business and a cafe that was voted number-one for best brunch in the city.

Then, in 1992, they cashed out, bought a Winnebago, and set out to explore North America.

"The whole point was to find a new place to live," Palmer said. But after traveling for two years from the Canadian Rockies to Taos, N.M., they returned to Philadelphia, deciding they loved living here best after all.

Palmer went into business with his father, a former dean of the Wharton School, developing a signage company to meet the requirements of the new Americans With Disabilities Act. Janick got a job as an archivist with Drexel.

They were happily settled until three years ago, when they got the itch to travel again. This time, they went in style.

"We bought our dream RV. A Greyhound bus with radiant floor heating, two satellite dishes, and four solar panels," Palmer said. They drove to Yucatan, spent five months on the Alaskan rim, and stopped wherever they wanted to visit museums and churches, see opera, and go to restaurants.

In Calgary, Alberta, they came upon a knitting shop where customers could come in and socialize and work on projects together.

"We both knit," Palmer said. "And we saw that knitting stores made the right move. They were creating communities."

Then in Key West, Fla., he went into a needlepoint store and had an epiphany about how places like that had to change.

Needlepoint shops traditionally display finished pieces to inspire customers, but those items are rarely, if ever, for sale. Palmer homed in on one of these sample projects - a gorgeous needlepoint bag with leather straps. "I could see it took someone a lot of time, and I know that beautiful things cost money."

He calculated how many hours had been spent on the work, estimated the value, and offered the shop owner $3,000.

The woman looked at him, shocked. "I wouldn't sell it for $10,000," she snapped.

Palmer tried to reason with her, to no avail.

"Don't worry," Janick told him. "I'll stitch it for you." During the year it took for Janick to finish the bag, they nurtured the idea of a 21st-century needlepoint store where crafters would be welcome and the fumble-fingered could order any needlepoint item they want.

"The knitting revolution started back in the '80s," said Jane Likens, associate professor of fashion design at Philadelphia University. "It appeals to younger people in high school and college, because you can make a fast little thing like a scarf and throw it around your neck."

One of the pioneers of the new knitting, Likens said, was textile artist Kaffe Fassett, whose work has been collected by Barbra Streisand and Lauren Bacall. "He demystified knitting's old-fashioned uptightness." Although Fassett has embraced needlepoint, too, she said, his adventures in stitchery have not yet had the same traction.

The snag, she theorizes, may be that needlepoint requires more time and patience. And also the dearth of shops like Palmer and Janick's, where stitchers can find scrims (the stiff cotton grids with patterns painted on them) to create not only traditional projects like Santa Claus Christmas ornaments, but other, cooler items as well. They sell patterns for belts, suspenders, and dog collars.

"When you have projects like these that are manageable and quick, that gets people hooked into the technique," Likens said. "Young people need to see that."

Thus, Rittenhouse Needlepoint devised Friday night happy hour, complete with Chardonnay and Brie, to attract Center City singles. And when a certified young person like Stonecipher happens upon the shop, she receives as much (or as little) attention as she wants.

She chose a pattern for a throw pillow that read, "One martini, two martini, three martini, floor," and with Palmer's help, decided to stitch it in silk and wool and velvet and metallics.

"It's for a friend who's recently divorced," Stonecipher explained. "She's joining the girls-night-out crowd again."

At a time when few people take the time to give handmade gifts, she said, she has seen how much her friends and family appreciate her needlepoint pieces. "I've actually had friends cry," she said. (Note to cynics: These were bona fide tears of gratitude.)

When she had gathered her purchases and brought them to the counter, Janick rang her up at the cash register.

"First time?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, beaming. "And I'm in heaven."