From the outside, the Elegant Needle is a simple, green one-story house nestled along Government Street. Upon stepping inside the quaint home-turned-craft store, you are greeted by colorful patterns on the walls and the faint chatter of crafters while they stitch.
Tucked into one of the rooms filled wall-to-wall with every color of embroidery thread imaginable are women of various ages sitting around a polished oval table. They’re chatting while working on needlepoint projects, creating a comfy social atmosphere in the quiet store.
As one of the only needlepoint stores in the Capital Region, the Elegant Needle attracts people of various ages and skill levels looking for guidance and endless supplies.
Needlepoint has recently gone viral on social media, causing many people much younger than the usual needlepoint artist to pick up the thread-and-needle craft. And that has brought an influx of younger people to the Elegant Needle, including a community of recent college graduates.
“It’s a new ‘joie de vivre’ that has swept through,” owner Catherine Pletsch said, using a French phrase that means finding joy.
The newcomers formed a bimonthly social club, Stitch Social BR, in January to give needlepoint artists a place to craft surrounded by like-minded creatives.
Caroline Cantrelle, 25, a graduate of Louisiana State University, and Taylor Steilman, 23, who graduated from High Point University, came up with the concept of a local social club dedicated to needlepoint because of trends they had seen on TikTok of people starting clubs all over the country. Both are avid needlepoint artists.
“A lot of people on TikTok basically were starting their own needlepoint clubs and talking about doing a stitch club, and I had some FOMO,” Cantrelle said, meaning “fear of missing out.” “I was like, ‘I want to stitch with other people.’”
The Elegant Needle already hosted classes on Saturdays, welcoming those looking to learn.
Cantrelle said she started by dropping in to The Elegant Needle during those Saturday classes but thought a regularly scheduled event built around needlepointing and community also might draw interest.
Cantrelle and Steilman, in collaboration with Pletsch, started Stitch Social BR. Club members gather on Monday evenings.
“Even if it’s someone that is here for the first time, they kind of just leave feeling like they’re a part of something,” Cantrelle said. “You just lose that sense of community once you’re out of undergrad and you’re not with your classmates all the time.”
Hannah Arceneaux, 28, a 2019 High Point University graduate, said she has enjoyed the club.
“I saw needle point popping off on Tik Tok and I was like I need a new hobby and so I looked up needle point stores near me and found here,” she said. “When I came in, they were like, ‘We’re about to start this social group, you should join.’”
The social club met once a month at first, but due to the unexpected number of participants — sometimes 50 people at a time — Steilman and Cantrelle thought it would be more beneficial to split the meeting up to twice a month.
“It kind of exploded,” Cantrelle said. “We were expecting something casual, 10 or fewer people.”
Since the creation of the social club, many people have come back to the meetings, forming friendships as they talk about their projects and daily lives while sitting around the crafting table.
“It’s amazingly wholesome,” said social club member Rebecca Atkins, 24, a social club member who is an undergraduate student at LSU.
The Elegant Needle still welcomes learners on Saturdays, as the social club is not the ideal place to learn the craft. Saturdays offer the chance to learn one on one, while Stitch Social BR is an opportunity to be social while working on projects, Pletsch said.
“If you don’t get it and you’re in an environment where you can compare it to somebody else, the one who gets it first will keep it, and the one who gets it last won’t keep it,” Pletsch said. “There’s no race for you to learn.”
Stitch Social BR meets twice a month at the Elegant Needle from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., at 6641 Government St. The next gathering will be March 31. For more information visit Social Stitch BR’s Instagram.
The Louisiana Collegiate News Collective thanks The Advocate in Baton Rouge for publishing this story.
This story was reported and written by a student with the support of the non-profit Louisiana Collegiate News Collaborative, an LSU-led coalition of eight universities funded by the Henry Luce and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foundations.