Many of us have wished on falling stars, but how many of those wishes actually came true? Nichole Heady, owner of Olde School Fiber & Craft, looked up at the sky one cold December night as she mulled over leasing an empty historic storefront in Gorham and starting a business there. “I was driving by here at 10 o’clock at night because I was crazy and went Christmas shopping at Home Goods late.

Then, when I was going through this light, right by this building, I saw a shooting star,” she recounts, tearing up a bit at the memory. “So I wished out loud, ‘If this is supposed to happen, make it happen.’ After that, things just kept falling into place. I felt like the universe was pushing me to do this.”

Now the former empty storefront is a cozy and welcoming shop, Olde School Fiber & Craft, that fulfills all the dreams Heady was cherishing on that cold winter’s night. “As soon as I walked in the front door, I could picture what I wanted to do with everything. I saw back here being a classroom, I saw a long vintage cash counter, I saw a light space that allowed the color of all the product to show,” she says. “Most importantly, I pictured it full of people making.” 

Making has always been a central part of Heady’s life. “I’ve been a maker almost my entire life. That was inspired a lot by my grandmothers, whose photos I keep up here in the store. They played a big role in my life as far as making goes,” recalls Heady. “Also hugely influential were Girl Scouts and 4-H. They were both really well-run organizations where I grew up in central Maine, in the Norridgewock–Skowhegan area.

For example, we went to somebody’s house in fourth grade and learned how to knit. Another woman took us in for six consecutive weeks on her sun porch. She had six sewing machines set up for us. We got to pick our own garment pattern out as well as our fabric. She worked with each of us to sew our own garments, and then at the Grange Hall, we had a fashion show with music and everything. It was one of the best experiences ever!” Heady continued making when she married and moved to Tennessee, starting an online paper crafting business with two other women. 

But when her husband’s work offered them a chance to return to Maine, they jumped at it. “I’m actually fifth-generation Gorham—I didn’t live here through elementary and high school, but my family is still here and being back is fantastic,” she says. “Recently my youngest was graduating high school, and I was thinking about doing something more fulfilling, maybe starting my own business again.” The empty building, once home to Gorham’s 5- and 10-cent store, kept drawing her back.

And then she wished on that fateful shooting star. “Everything just started happening really fast right after Christmas, and on Valentine’s Day, we signed the lease on this place. It was the freakiest, scariest, most exciting day of my life, because this place was a disaster,” she says, shaking her head and laughing. With a hard opening deadline of mid-May, she and her husband threw themselves into the project. “We were here pulling 12-, 14-hour days every day.  

God bless my husband, because he was so amazing. I tell everybody that these walls truly hold his love for me,” she says with obvious affection. “He’s a hobbyist woodworker. All this finish work is a hundred percent him. He built a giant crafting table to spec. He painstakingly installed the butcher block countertops, and he polished and sanded six times to get the nice vintage sheen to them. He built the cash counter from scratch based on a very blurry Pinterest photo that I found. He never said no! He always figured out how to do everything on a very tight budget.”

Meanwhile, Heady began stocking the new shelves her husband had installed. “It was very important to me that this store feel very approachable. I wanted everybody to feel very welcome, no matter what kind of budget they had to spend on supplies. I wanted to have a diverse price range so that we could accommodate everybody,” she says. Like many other makers, she was hit hard by the news that Jo-Ann Fabrics was closing. “They had some mainstays that suddenly no one was going to be able to buy locally anymore.

We’re now building up a selection of those basics so that if people figure out, ‘Oh, I’m doing this project, and I need pinking shears,’ they can come here and get those.” Another important change she made in response to Jo-Ann Fabrics’ announcement: she decided to carry even more embroidery floss. “One of the biggest shifts we made is that we carry all 500 colors of DMC six-strand embroidery floss. We are, as far as I know, the only people in Maine who have that. We have people who drive in from out of state to shop our custom-built wall. Of course, my husband built it. I went to him, and I said, ‘I want a wall with 500 little pegs.’ He was like, ‘You’re crazy, but okay,’” recalls Heady.

The wall of embroidery floss, its silky colors gleaming in the light from the enormous windows, is strategically placed to draw folks into the shop. “I purposely put that wall facing one of the large windows where people get stopped at the stoplight every day. Even before we opened, before anybody knew what we were doing, everybody was talking about it in town,” says Heady. “I wanted people to be able to tell from the outside that we’re a serious craft store.

We want to carry what the community needs.” Her patrons range in age from the very young (children coming in with allowance money to buy 25-cent buttons for friendship bracelets) to college kids from nearby USM and St. Joseph’s College (both of which have thriving fiber arts clubs), to retirees returning to the cross-stitching or knitting they put down years ago.

The entire community has responded enthusiastically, Heady reports. “Fiber crafts seem to be already embedded in this town. The people who have already done all these things are so excited to meet their neighbors, who they didn’t realize were doing these crafts too. To provide them with a space where they’re rediscovering each other or learning new things—to get to be a part of that is very exciting to me.”

If people aren’t already skilled crafters, she’s happy to guide them to the extensive class listings or urge them to come to the community stitching circle she hosts twice a week.  “We have a daytime slot on Tuesdays and an evening slot on Thursdays, and each lasts for two hours. People are invited to just come in, no reservations required. They can come for the whole two hours or just part of it, and bring their latest projects.

It has been amazing to see all the different types of people coming,” says Heady. She continues, “One night we had a full table on a Thursday night. There was a woman that had a little tabletop spinning wheel, and she was spinning. There were two people hand quilting. There was somebody doing cross-stitch, there were two crocheters, there was a knitter, and they were all around this table together. They were all working on their projects, and they were laughing, and people were asking others about their crafts.

I was taken back to that first time when I came to tour the space and pictured this area as a classroom. It was like a dream come true moment to see it being used in that way.” That shooting star really did its work.