Saying farewell to Two Rock craft store

The owners of Graham’s Country Crafts are retiring after 48 years.|

TWO ROCK - In a sun-soaked workspace on the Graham family property west of Petaluma, a group of women sit around a long table every Tuesday morning to work on arts and craft projects, and share a few laughs with classmates that have evolved into lifelong friends.

At the head of the table is their teacher, Helen Graham, who has held classes at Graham’s Country Crafts for decades. During the busiest years, they were offered seven times a week, she said, “but now we do well to have one.”

Soon, these weekly get-togethers will be a thing of the past.

Graham, 87, and her husband Carl, who is turning 90 in May, are shuttering their beloved shop after 48 years once they sell most of their inventory.

It has nothing to do with competition from a big box store, or the shift to online retailers like some might imagine for a family-owned business that used word-of-mouth advertising to attract customers to its bucolic farm on Pepper Road.

No, they’re simply retiring.

“It’s time we quit,” Helen Graham said.

The shop has been holding a liquidation sale since January 2017, initially offering customers 50 percent off before increasing it to 75 percent last year. They’re open Tuesdays and Saturdays now, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

“People bring up a basket full of things, and when we ring it up and give them the percentage off, they can’t believe it,” Graham said. “‘I had more to spend than that.’ Well, spend it. Go buy some more.”

A step into this craft wonderland is like a step back in time.

The aisles are meticulously organized, and the selections are seemingly endless. Dolls and doll heads, barrels full of beads, shelves of bells, hand-carved bird houses, sewing and stitching materials and kits, faux flowers for arrangements, paint supplies, walls of macrame cords and ribbons, ceramics and stained glass for decorating.

Judy Cooper, one of the part-time employees, pointed out that any wooden item that isn’t wrapped in a plastic bag was carved by Carl, who is carpenter by trade, and built most of the shop’s interior himself.

Even now, he finds joy in making custom orders.

“Carl is very strong physically,” Cooper said. “I swear for 40 years he’s had oatmeal every morning with all of his stuff piled on top.”

He was away from the shop this week, rehabbing after a recent hip replacement surgery.

“I think I’m going to have a heck of a time when he comes home because he’s going to want to come down here,” Graham said of her husband. “I don’t think he needs to come down, but he’ll do it. He’s very stubborn. He does what he wants to.”

In addition to retirement, the two will be celebrating their 70th anniversary this summer. They met in San Francisco when he was in the Marines and worked on a supply base.

They would often come up to the farm that Graham grew up on, and longed to get back after spending time in Georgia and Missouri near Carl’s family.

Graham isn’t necessarily excited to be closing the shop, but she is relieved that they don’t have to make their almost quarterly drives to Los Angeles to pick up more inventory anymore.

On one occasion, some of the supplies weren’t properly tied down and blew onto the road. Another time, they were so exhausted when they got home they forgot they had strapped materials onto the roof. When they remembered the next morning, everything had been blanketed in dust and dirt.

They’ve taken pride in remembering every name of every student, and have a mental Rolodex for recalling the most finite details when it comes to a specific item and its origin.

Selling things at a fair price has been a cornerstone of the business, and Graham has made special trips to craft shows around the country just to connect with a manufacturer that had a specific item her customers had been asking about.

It’s that kinship with her regulars, the ones that have been shopping there for years, that mean the most to the family.

“It’s been a fun business. I’ve met a lot of people,” Graham said. “There’s a lot of them coming in now that say, ‘My grandma came here for classes.’ It’s really rewarding (to hear that). It is.”

(Contact News Editor Yousef Baig at yousef.baig@arguscourier.com or 776-8461, and on Twitter @YousefBaig.)

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