Ashley Spencer took up spinning and weaving in 2020, then kept running into the same wall: yarn was hard to come by in NWA. So in 2024 she opened Yarn Alchemy, a fiber-arts shop at the 8th Street Market. It sells the supply, but the point is the practice — structured classes in knitting, crochet, spinning, and weaving, plus a weekly open studio where the people who do this work turn up to do it together. The classroom moves into a dedicated learning space at the Market this fall.