Let’s get crafty

We grabbed 10 minutes with Gail Macrow, our Craft Centre Supervisor, to find out everything you need to know about the department.

What crafts do you offer at the centre?

Papercraft – We offer a variety of papercraft items to suit the beginner through to the more experienced crafter. We have specialist inks for stamping and colouring and a wide range of papers for scrapbooking and card making. We also stock machines such as the Cricut and Sizzix Big Shot.

Decopatch – We have a large selection of decopatch papers and items to decorate.

Knitting – We have a good range of knitting yarns and patterns along with everything else you’ll need to finish your garments.

Sewing – Our sewing area is growing with lots of new fabrics and more arriving all the time. Sewing seems to be on the up, helped along by BBC Two’s Great British Sewing Bee programme, aired earlier this year. We have recently started hosting sewing workshops and have acquired some lovely new sewing machines to use.

Books – We stock a great selection of books covering a range of crafts.

Our main aim is to grow with our customers and meet their needs as they progress, as well as bring new people in and encourage their interests.

What does your daily role include?

Since taking over as Supervisor in March, my role is even more varied, although I probably don’t spend quite as much time out on the shop floor. There is the usual admin work to do such as responding to emails and working out the rota. I arrange and schedule the workshops and order new stock. I teach patchwork classes once a month, give lessons on the sewing and papercraft machines and when I can, I like to sit out on the Demo Bar advising people how to use our products and machines.

I can’t take all the credit for the Craft Centre, I have a wonderful team and couldn’t do it without them. I do consider myself very lucky to have a job that is my hobby too. My husband always says, ‘You don’t go to work, you go to play!’

Describe an average day at the Craft Centre.

One of the first jobs is to check if there is a workshop on and get prepared, if we haven’t done so already. We do a quick clean up to make sure the Craft Centre looks tidy then we stock and tidy the shelves between customers. We like a challenge and enjoy helping our visitors find what they are looking for or other ways of achieving it. We do get chances to ‘play’, this gives us a chance to learn about new products and how to use them and pass this on to others. It also sparks off ideas between us and our customers give us tips and ideas too. 

We get great pleasure when a customer brings back an item they have finished or made to show us, even more so when we have helped them somehow. We love hosting workshops and seeing what people have created.

What makes our job more enjoyable is having time to really talk to our customers. It’s great to show them our more specialist items and how is best to use them. My favourite thing at the moment is Gilding Flakes. I love them as they give such a rich look to projects of all kinds and I keep threatening to do my nails with them!

Over the years we have got to know a lot of our customers really well and we enjoy showing them new items to suit their interests.