Business Hours

About

Most businesses start with a business plan, goals and many sleepless nights of worry.  Dreams and visions and plans stir up in many sewing enthusiasts of owning their own quilt shop.  Ours started with

“Hey, we could open a fabric store.”  And Six Weeks Later We DID.

And that is just how Pine Needles Quilt Shop opened in Cresco, Iowa on January 2, 1999.  Our first day of business was a snowstorm.  We opened for three hours and had to shut down as the Iowa State Patrol started closing roads.  I will never forget the faces and the welcome from those first customers who graced the threshold of our humble little store.

We are a family-owned business and our kids grew up working in the business alongside us.  Their earliest memories are of being “paid” in pizza to help move the store around or sitting in our living room folding and attaching stamps to flyers to mail to our fans most enthusiastic to hear about the happenings at our little quilt shop.

 

Owner Jill Reicks had started a business with friends in 1988 making gift items that were sold at craft fairs then craft shows, then through Country Sampler magazine.  For a period of time, the business Lydia’s Sisters ran a vigorous wholesale business selling coasters and placemats and wall quilts to gift shops all across America.  A mother of five young children, Jill engaged the services of friends and neighbors in making parts of the projects.  Many of the sewists have gone on to establish their own businesses in the sewing and crafting industry.  When her youngest child was readying to go to kindergarten, it was time for a career change…perhaps go back to her teaching vocation.  Then the quilt shop idea popped up and in less than six weeks, the store was opened in the charming town of Cresco, Iowa.