A Yarn Store With Rolling Ladders: Brooklyn General Store

Type "yarn store near me" anywhere south of Atlantic Avenue and one name keeps rising to the top. Brooklyn General Store, at 128 Union Street, sits on the western edge of Carroll Gardens in the small Columbia Street Waterfront District. The shop calls itself a maker's wonderland, and the description fits. Skeins climb toward the ceiling, bolts of fabric line the walls, and a class calendar covers knitting, sewing, quilting, spinning, embroidery, crochet and mending for anyone ready to pick up a new skill.

The shop occupies the old Frank's Department Store, a 1930s building in the Columbia Street Waterfront District, the pocket of Brooklyn between Cobble Hill and Red Hook on the water side of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The floor-to-ceiling shelving, the rolling ladders and the original wooden floors all survive, restored rather than reproduced.

The founder is Catherine Clark, a midwife who has been knitting and sewing since she was five years old. That background shows in how the store is stocked. Clark also writes knitting patterns, and the store sells them alongside the yarn they were designed for, which makes it easy to leave with a complete project instead of a loose idea.

The shop's reach goes well beyond Union Street. In October 2026 the team hosted A Woolen Affair in Kingston, New York, a two-day gathering with fiber products, live music, food and a strong sense of community. The store has also long served as a stop on the NYC Yarn Crawl, the citywide celebration that sends knitters and crocheters from shop to shop across the boroughs.

The yarn wall is the reason most people make the trip. La Bien Aimée, the French hand-dyer known for saturated, painterly colorways, gets the deepest selection on the shelves, with dozens of listings online. Next to it you will find Skydance Fibers, Harrisville Naturals, Jamiesons of Shetland, Isager, Blue Sky Fibers, De Rerum Natura, Biches et Bûches, Magpie Fibers, Jill Draper, Knitting for Olive, Laine Saint-Pierre, Spincycle, Plant Dyed Yarn by Mehlsen, Ito, Illimani, Cosy Posy Yarn Co., Little Fox Yarns, Explorer Knits and Rico Design.

If you knit colorwork, Jamiesons of Shetland is the obvious place to start, since its jumper-weight wool is the traditional choice for Fair Isle. For lightweight shawls and halos of fuzz, look for the silk mohair. Sock knitters tend to go straight for La Bien Aimée's tough BFL sock base, a sturdy Bluefaced Leicester blend that holds up to daily wear.

Fiber options are wide. The shop carries alpaca, cashmere, cormo, corriedale, linen, merino, mohair, romney, silk, wool and yak, in both superwash and non-superwash versions. That matters for planning a project, because superwash wool survives the washing machine while non-superwash wool blocks crisply and felts on purpose when you want it to.

Brooklyn General is not only a yarn shop. Fabric fills a large part of the floor, and quilters and garment sewists will find plenty to browse. There is a full selection of tools and notions, from needles and hooks to the small hardware a finished piece needs. The store is also an authorized BERNINA sewing machine dealer, which is unusual for a neighborhood craft shop and useful if you have been weighing a machine upgrade and want to see one in person before buying.

The store also sells its own branded goods and Catherine Clark's pattern collection. If you are buying for a maker friend, a pattern paired with the matching skeins makes a thoughtful gift that is ready to cast on the same evening.

The class program is one of the strongest arguments for choosing this shop over an online order. The current schedule includes Learn to Knit, Beginner Crochet, Beginner Tunisian Crochet and a beginner sewing session where students make scrunchies. Open classes listed on the store's site run from $60 to $125, with Learn to Knit at $85.

Past sessions show how far the program goes. Recent offerings have included First Sock Knitting, Next Steps in Knitting with a bandana project, The Math of Knitting on yarn, gauge and substitutions, and The Language of Knitting, which takes the mystery out of written patterns. Sewists have had a circle skirt class at the intermediate level and a beginning sewing boot camp with Melissa Fitzpatrick. Quilters have worked through the Brooklyn General Stars quilt and the Beasley Hollow pattern, and Debbie Stoller has taught the granny square. Popular classes sell out, so book early once a date you want appears on the calendar.

The store opens at noon from Tuesday through Sunday and closes at 6 pm. It is closed on Mondays. Weekday afternoons are the calmest window, when you can take your time at the yarn wall and staff have room to help with pattern questions. Saturdays bring more browsers and class traffic, so arrive close to opening if you want space to compare colorways.

A few habits keep the visit pleasant for everyone. Bring your pattern, or at least its yardage and gauge, so staff can suggest substitutions that actually work. Squish the skeins gently and return them to the cubby they came from, since the shelves are organized by brand and weight. If you are matching a dye lot, buy every skein for the project in one trip. Hand-dyed yarn shifts from batch to batch, and the next restock may look different. If you track favorite shops and saved colorways in the Karpo APP, add notes about which brands you liked before you leave.

Once you have your skeins, walk a few blocks along the waterfront side of the district to Columbia Street Waterfront Park. This stretch of green between Degraw and Kane streets is part of the Brooklyn Greenway, with hilly lawns, tree-lined paths, benches and a dog run.

From there, cross under the expressway into Carroll Gardens proper and head to Carroll Park, the third-oldest park in Brooklyn. It began in the late 1840s as a private community garden, became a public park in 1853 and is named for Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Look for the decorative cast iron gates and the bronze and granite Soldiers and Sailors World War I Monument from 1920.

Brooklyn General Store is at 128 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231, on the block between Columbia and Hicks streets. Hours are 12 pm to 6 pm, Tuesday through Sunday. The nearest subway station is Carroll Street on the F and G lines. Drivers can take the BQE to Atlantic Avenue, and street parking is available on the block.