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Wool Gathering: Sewing, Knitting and Fibre Arts in Fredericton

13 min read · Published July 24, 2026 · By Hey Freddy

TL;DR

Fredericton’s fibre scene runs deeper than it looks. King Woolens and Yarns in Brookside Mall is the city’s local yarn shop, The Quilting Shed at 50 Hedley Street handles quilting fabric plus sewing machine sales and service, and Fabricville on Prospect Street covers everything else by the metre. Two active quilting guilds meet monthly, NBCCD’s Honeybee Folk School runs weekend workshops for the public, and Briggs & Little, Canada’s oldest woolen mill, is a 40 minute drive away in Harvey.

Why Fredericton is quietly a fibre town

For a city of 65,000 or so, Fredericton punches well above its weight in wool. The reason is partly institutional: the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design sits right on Queen Street downtown, turning out textile and fashion design graduates every spring, and its instructors and alumni thread through every guild, market stall, and workshop in the region. It is partly geographic: Briggs & Little, which Tourism New Brunswick lists as the oldest woolen mill in Canada (spinning since 1857), operates about 40 minutes down the road in Harvey, which means the default local yarn here is honest, rustic, 100 per cent Canadian wool rather than something shipped in from overseas.

And it is partly cultural. New Brunswick winters are long, heating pads only do so much, and generations of quilters, knitters, rug hookers and weavers have built institutions that simply kept going. The Fredericton Quilters’ Guild dates back to 1982. Craft NB, the provincial fine craft organization, stages its big Christmas fine craft sale in Fredericton every year, and fibre artists are always well represented on those tables.

What the city does not have anymore is a big downtown yarn destination. Yarns on York, the much loved shop at 72 York Street, is permanently closed, and its Ravelry listing now says so in plain terms. That closure still stings for a lot of local knitters, but the scene did what fibre people do: it regrouped. The action has shifted to the north side, to a quilting and machine shop near Hanwell Road, to NBCCD’s community workshops, and to guild halls and church basements where the real knowledge lives.

This guide covers where to buy yarn and fabric, who will fix your machine, which guilds are actually meeting, and where to learn, whether you are a total beginner or someone with a stash that has its own postal code. Everything named here was verified as operating at the time of writing, but small shops keep small-shop hours, so a quick call before a special trip is never wasted.

Yarn shops: King Woolens and the supporting cast

King Woolens and Yarns is Fredericton’s local yarn shop, tucked into Brookside Mall at 435 Brookside Drive (Unit 17) on the north side. It is a proper LYS in the traditional sense: shelves of workhorse wool rather than boutique hand-dyes, with Briggs & Little front and centre alongside Estelle, King Cole and a good selection of sock-weight (fingering) yarns. Just as valuable is what the shop gives away for free, namely pattern support. If your sweater has gone sideways at the underarm decreases, this is where you bring it. The shop also offers classes, and its posted hours run weekdays from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Saturdays to 4 p.m., closed Sundays, though it is worth checking their Facebook page before driving across the river.

Fabricville at 1211 Prospect Street is the surprise second stop for knitters. The chain is known for fabric, but the Fredericton store carries a legitimate yarn section, mostly commercial acrylics and blends, which is exactly what you want for baby blankets, charity knitting, and anything destined for a washing machine. It is open seven days a week, which no other fibre retailer in town can claim.

Michaels, at 9 Riocan Avenue in the Corbett Centre off Regent Street, rounds out the craft-chain tier with big-box yarn brands, needles, hooks and notions, plus frequent coupons that make it the cheapest place in town to grab a skein of dishcloth cotton on a whim.

For anything fancier, Fredericton stitchers lean on two habits: road trips and mail order. Cricket Cove in Saint John is the closest full-service destination yarn shop, about an hour away, and it ships. And plenty of locals simply buy direct from the Briggs & Little mill store in Harvey, which we will get to below, because when the mill is that close, why pay retail markup on Canadian wool?

Fabric and quilting shops

The Quilting Shed is the city’s dedicated quilt shop, now located at 50 Hedley Street, Suite 4, just off Hanwell Road (look for the Avis/Budget rental office next door). Run by Andrea Rennick, the shop moved from its original Hanwell Road location and stocks high quality quilting cottons, notions, and Grace quilting frames, alongside its other identity as a sewing machine dealer. Hours are on the compact side: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday to Wednesday and Friday, until 6 p.m. on Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays, closed Sundays. The phone number is 506-262-4739, and the shop publishes a Friday email newsletter that is the easiest way to hear about new fabric arrivals and events.

Fabricville at 1211 Prospect Street (506-458-9679) is the volume play: apparel fabric, quilting cotton, fleece, upholstery and drapery material, interfacing, zippers, thread walls, and a custom curtains and blinds service. Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Sign up for their membership program before you buy anything substantial; the member pricing routinely knocks a serious percentage off the cut table price, and garment sewists in town plan whole projects around their sales.

Beyond city limits, New Brunswick’s quilt shops form a loose circuit that Fredericton quilters happily drive. The Covered Bridge Quiltery in Riverview and the Fabric Cupboard in Moncton come up constantly in local guild resource lists, and Chloe’s Quilting Café in Saint-Louis-de-Kent has a provincial reputation. None of that is a Saturday errand, but quilters treat fabric shopping as a destination sport anyway.

One honest note: if you sew garments rather than quilts, Fredericton’s selection of fashion fabric is thin beyond Fabricville. NBCCD fashion students order a lot online, and so will you. The consolation is that basics, linings and muslin are cheap and close at hand.

Sewing machine sales, service and longarm quilting

When your machine starts eating thread, Fredericton has real options, which is not something every small city can say. The Quilting Shed at 50 Hedley Street is the local PFAFF dealer for new machines and, crucially, services and repairs all makes and models, not just the brands it sells. For most people this is the first call: drop the machine off, describe the noise it is making (imitations welcome), and let a technician sort out the timing.

For a longtime independent alternative, directory listings point to Lyndon’s Sewing Machine Service and Repair at 90 Woodside Lane on the city’s south side, reachable at 506-459-7324. It is a small operation, so call ahead rather than showing up with a serger under your arm. The Fredericton Quilters’ Guild also maintains a page of machine sales and service providers around New Brunswick on its blog, which is worth consulting if you own something unusual, since certain dealers in Saint John and Quispamsis handle brands no one in Fredericton carries.

Quilters with a finished top and no appetite for wrestling it through a domestic machine have a healthy local longarm scene. The Quilting Shed keeps a public list of longarm quilters in and around Fredericton, including operators in the city proper plus nearby communities like Nasonworth and Charters Settlement. Prices vary by pattern density and quilt size, so get a quote or two; turnaround stretches badly in the weeks before Christmas, as every guild member learns exactly once.

If you are buying your first machine, the honest local advice is this: a serviced second-hand machine from a dealer beats a new machine in a big-box blister pack at the same price. Ask at the Quilting Shed about trade-ins, and check the guilds’ classifieds. Quilters upgrade often, and their cast-off machines have usually been babied and serviced annually, which is more than most of us can say for our cars.

Guilds, knit nights and finding your people

Fredericton supports two quilting guilds, which tells you something about the depth of the scene. The Fredericton Quilters’ Guild, established in 1982, meets the third Tuesday of the month from September through May at 7 p.m. at the Johnston Avenue Senior Centre on the north side. Membership runs about $30 a year, and the guild programme mixes speakers, workshops, charity quilting and show and tell. Its blog updates only sporadically, so email the guild (the address is on their blog) or ask at the Quilting Shed to confirm details before your first visit.

The Elm City Quilters’ Guild is the second, and its blog was still posting meeting recaps as of 2025. It meets the first Wednesday of the month at 7 p.m., September to June, at Gibson United Church Hall at 183 Gibson Street, also on the north side. Meetings feature trunk shows, quilt exchanges and a friendly show and tell, and the blog states plainly that new members are welcome. Neither guild expects mastery; both contain members who will cheerfully teach you.

Knitters and crocheters organize more informally. King Woolens and Yarns offers classes and is the natural place to ask what sit-and-stitch gatherings are currently running, since these groups migrate between coffee shops and living rooms and rarely maintain websites. The Fredericton Public Library at 12 Carleton Street runs seasonal programming, and craft socials appear on the New Brunswick Public Library Service calendar periodically, so it is worth checking their listings or our events calendar.

The other reliable entry point is online. Ravelry remains the backbone of knitting life everywhere, and local Facebook groups for Fredericton crafters, destashes and buy-and-sell are active daily. Post that you are new in town and knit, and you will have coffee plans within the week. Fibre people recruit shamelessly.

Classes and workshops: NBCCD and the Honeybee Folk School

The New Brunswick College of Craft and Design at 457 Queen Street is the engine room of Fredericton’s textile education. Its two-year Textile Design diploma covers spinning, felting, weaving, machine knitting and surface printing, and its two-year Fashion Design diploma takes students from foundational sewing through pattern development, tailoring, draping and corsetry, ending with a graduate collection shown at a major Atlantic Canadian fashion show. If you want to make textiles your actual career, this is the door, and it is remarkable that a city this size has one.

For the rest of us, the college runs the Honeybee Folk School, its community education arm, and this is the single best answer to the question every adult beginner asks: where can I just learn to sew? Honeybee workshops run in NBCCD’s own studios on Queen Street (and occasionally partner venues), taught by professional craftspeople, on evenings and weekends. Recent offerings have included a weekend Intro to Sewing course priced in the range of $164 to $205, alongside ceramics, jewellery and other crafts. Offerings rotate seasonally, and the school has also run workshops as part of Frostival in winter. Check honeybeefolkschool.ca for the current calendar, or call 506-230-3047.

Retail classes fill in the gaps. King Woolens and Yarns offers knitting classes and pattern help at the shop in Brookside Mall, and the Quilting Shed is the place to ask about quilting instruction and machine orientation when you buy from them. Both guilds also run member workshops, which is arguably the best value in town: guild membership costs about as much as two skeins of sock yarn and comes with a room full of teachers.

Further out, Brigadoon Fiber Farm in Hoyt offers fibre-craft classes on the farm itself, which means you can learn to work with alpaca fibre a short walk from the animal that grew it. More on them below.

Thrifted fabric and stitching on a budget

Fibre arts can be an expensive habit, but Fredericton offers plenty of ways to keep it cheap. The anchor is Value Village at 371 Bishop Drive, off Prospect Street, where the craft section regularly coughs up fabric lengths, notions, needles, embroidery hoops and half-finished projects abandoned by their previous owners. The linens aisle is the real hunting ground: cotton sheets for muslins and quilt backings, wool blankets for rug hooking and coat linings, and curtains that contain more yardage per dollar than any cut table in the country.

Thrifted sweaters deserve their own paragraph. A wool sweater in an ugly shape but a good colour costs a few dollars and unravels (the knitters’ term is frogging) into hundreds of metres of perfectly usable yarn. Check the seams before buying: sweaters that were knit and seamed unravel into long continuous strands, while cut-and-sewn ones give you short pieces. Lambswool, merino and cashmere all pass through Fredericton’s thrift racks weekly, priced like acrylic.

The city’s other second-hand channels are worth working too. The Salvation Army thrift store and the smaller charity shops around town turn up sewing machines, fabric and notions irregularly, and estate sales in a city with this many lifelong quilters can be staggering. Guild destash sales are the insider move: when guild members thin their stashes, quality quilting cotton sells for a fraction of retail, and attending is another argument for joining a guild in the first place.

Finally, do not sleep on the sale racks at the full-price shops. Fabricville’s member pricing and clearance section can bring fabric under thrift-store prices when the timing is right, and end-of-line yarns at Michaels get marked down hard. Between all of these, a careful Fredericton stitcher can outfit an entire practice wardrobe or first quilt for less than the cost of one fancy skein of hand-dyed sock yarn. For more second-hand hunting grounds, see our shopping guide.

Mills, fibre farms and the festival circuit

The best fibre destination in the region is not in the city at all: it is Briggs & Little Woolen Mills at 3500 Route 635 in Harvey, about 40 minutes southwest of Fredericton. Founded in 1857 and billed by Tourism New Brunswick as the oldest woolen mill in Canada, it has survived fire and rebuilding four times and still spins 100 per cent Canadian wool plus an 80/20 wool-nylon sock blend. The on-site retail store is open year round, mill seconds and all, and a pilgrimage there is practically a rite of passage for New Brunswick knitters. Call 1-800-561-9276 if you want to confirm hours before making the drive; it pairs nicely with our day trips guide.

Closer to the river’s southern reaches, Brigadoon Fiber Farm at 6145 Route 101 in Hoyt raises a small herd of alpacas and sheep and runs an on-farm boutique selling yarn, roving, woven and knit goods. The farm offers tours where you can meet the animals and see fibre processing up close, plus fibre-crafting classes, and it is wheelchair accessible. They have also hosted a spring fibre day event in Fredericton itself.

The festival calendar gives the scene its rhythm. The Gagetown Fibre Gathering, held each September at the Queens County Fairgrounds (the 2025 edition, its eighth, ran on September 20), fills historic Gagetown with hand-dyed yarn, fleeces, demos and live music, an easy 45 minutes from town. Spring brings the Fiddlehead Fibre Festival in Bristol up the valley, and June offers the Atlantic Yarn and Fibre Festival in Shediac for those willing to combine wool with lobster.

Then in late November, Craft NB’s Christmas fine craft sale lands in Fredericton, stacked with juried work from the province’s best makers, including weavers, felters and textile artists. Watch our events calendar for dates; it is where half your Christmas shopping should happen anyway.

Key takeaways

King Woolens and Yarns in Brookside Mall (435 Brookside Drive, Unit 17) is Fredericton’s local yarn shop, carrying Briggs & Little, Estelle and King Cole plus classes and pattern help; the former downtown shop Yarns on York is permanently closed.
The Quilting Shed at 50 Hedley Street, Suite 4 (506-262-4739) is the city’s quilt shop, PFAFF dealer, and sewing machine service centre for all makes and models.
Fabricville at 1211 Prospect Street is the only seven-day-a-week fabric store in town, with member pricing that meaningfully cuts costs.
Two guilds are worth joining: the Fredericton Quilters’ Guild (third Tuesdays, Johnston Avenue Senior Centre) and the Elm City Quilters’ Guild (first Wednesdays, Gibson United Church Hall, 183 Gibson Street).
NBCCD’s Honeybee Folk School runs public evening and weekend craft workshops, including intro sewing, in the college’s Queen Street studios.
Briggs & Little in Harvey, Canada’s oldest woolen mill (est. 1857), has a year-round mill store about 40 minutes from Fredericton, and Brigadoon Fiber Farm in Hoyt offers alpaca yarn, tours and classes.

Common questions

Is there a local yarn shop in Fredericton?

Yes. King Woolens and Yarns in Brookside Mall (435 Brookside Drive, Unit 17) on the north side carries Briggs & Little, Estelle, King Cole and sock yarns, and offers classes and pattern support. Fabricville and Michaels also stock commercial yarn. The former downtown shop Yarns on York at 72 York Street is permanently closed.

Where can I get my sewing machine repaired in Fredericton?

The Quilting Shed at 50 Hedley Street, Suite 4 (506-262-4739) services and repairs all makes and models and sells new PFAFF machines. Directory listings also point to Lyndon’s Sewing Machine Service and Repair at 90 Woodside Lane (506-459-7324); call ahead, as it is a small operation.

Does Fredericton have a quilting guild?

It has two. The Fredericton Quilters’ Guild (established 1982) meets the third Tuesday of the month, September to May, at 7 p.m. at the Johnston Avenue Senior Centre, with membership around $30 a year. The Elm City Quilters’ Guild meets the first Wednesday of the month, September to June, at Gibson United Church Hall, 183 Gibson Street. Confirm details by email before your first visit, as both guilds update their blogs irregularly.

Can I take a sewing or fibre arts class without enrolling in college?

Yes. NBCCD’s Honeybee Folk School runs public workshops in the college’s studios at 457 Queen Street, including weekend intro sewing courses that have run in the $164 to $205 range. King Woolens and Yarns offers knitting classes, both quilting guilds run member workshops, and Brigadoon Fiber Farm in Hoyt teaches fibre-craft classes on the farm.

Where is the closest wool mill to Fredericton?

Briggs & Little Woolen Mills at 3500 Route 635 in Harvey, about 40 minutes southwest of the city. Founded in 1857, it is billed as the oldest woolen mill in Canada, and its on-site retail store is open year round. Call 1-800-561-9276 to confirm hours before driving out.

Where can I find cheap fabric in Fredericton?

Start at Value Village (371 Bishop Drive) for thrifted fabric, sheets, wool blankets and unravel-worthy sweaters, then watch Fabricville’s member pricing and clearance section at 1211 Prospect Street. Guild destash sales and estate sales are the insider sources for quality quilting cotton at a fraction of retail.

Sources & further reading

This guide reflects the documented local consensus, reporting, reviews and community voices, verified where possible. Things change; if we’re out of date, tell Freddy.