Exploring Life & Business with Courtney Cox of Scenic Stitches

Today we’d like to introduce you to Courtney Cox

Hi Courtney, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
In May 2022, I moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee and immediately started looking for a knitting group so I could make friends. As luck would have it, I found an active group with members close to my age on the first try. At the time, there was no local yarn store in the city, so I asked what they did to get yarn.

For the uninitiated, yarn is available in a wide selection of fibers, colors, and thicknesses. Most serious knitters and crocheters shop at specialty stores rather than big box craft stores, which tend to only offer acrylic yarn (plastic) rather than yarn made from real animal fibers. Yarn purchasing a serious business sometimes referred to as a second hobby, separate from the knitting or crochet.

So what did this cheerful lot of fiber enthusiasts do to acquire more yarn? Travel, or order it online.

I have a strong preference for purchasing yarn in person rather than online, so I joined in on the day trips to various yarn stores and even a road trip to the New York Sheep and Wool Festival. While traveling together can undoubtedly be a fun bonding activity for a friend group, it can also be time and cost prohibitive. We often lamented that there wasn’t a fiber festival closer to Chattanooga – the closest one was in Asheville, North Carolina.

In 2023, I joined the Periscope Artist-Entrepreneur training program put on by Arts Build. I have been a professional fiber artist for years, first as an award-winning and internationally exhibiting hand embroidery artist specializing in portraiture, and then as a professional knitwear and crochet designer and pattern writer. My knitting and crochet work involves partnering with yarn companies to create garment and accessory designs and then develop them into patterns for the layperson to use.

During the Periscope program, I decided to explore the possibility of fiber arts related events, specifically a knitting retreat. Periscope concluded in May 2024 with a pitch competition, during which I won first place pitching my knitting retreat idea. Building on this momentum, I went about searching for a venue, building a team, and further refining the idea.

The knitting retreat was eventually discarded in favor of a fiber festival. Scenic Stitches was started as a fiber arts event planning company, and already has two event under our belt before the first anniversary of winning the Periscope pitch competition.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Planning a large-scale event for the first time with limited experience was of course a challenging experience. It would not have happened without the help of my committee, who helped not only with the workload but also in developing the event itself.

Choosing a venue was, to me, the biggest hurdle. The venue shapes the event, from the experience to the size. I visited a lot of spaces before settling on the Chattanooga Convention Center – which was lucky because our event grew in size during the planning and they were able to accommodate. We had to ask the convention center for more space twice!

It wasn’t always smooth, but I decided early on that there are no mistakes in year one, only information. We learned a lot and are excited to use what we’ve learned to make the event even better in the coming years.

The event itself went very well. We had a lot of vendor interest, excellent volunteer support, and an incredible attendee turnout!

As you know, we’re big fans of Scenic Stitches. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Scenic Stitches is an event planning business that specializes in fiber arts-centered events. We are best known for our Scenic Stitches Fiber Festival which launched in February 2025 at the Chattanooga Convention Center and attracted over 2200 attendees.

Our first event was a pop-up inside the downtown Hot Chocolatier during MAINx24 in December 2024. We hosted a community yarn bombing. Yarn bombing is guerilla art in which knitted or crocheted fabric is wrapped around a stationary object (tree, bike rack, bench, etc). At our pop-up, we had covered the trees in front of the Hot Chocolatier with crochet and invited attendees to make a pompom, tassel, or crocheted motif to add to the crochet. The collaborative yarn bomb was then left up for six weeks. More than 100 people stopped in to play!

In February, the first annual Scenic Stitches Fiber Festival kicked off with 70 vendors selling fiber arts supplies and some ready-made items, classes on a variety of fiber arts (weaving, drop spinning, advanced crochet, kumihomo, advanced knitting, and more), tattoo artists with a selection of fiber arts-themed flash designs, a handmade fashion show, and several interactive stations including a stitch marker swap, a photo station, and a sit-and-stitch blanket.

Plans for another festival focused on large-scale fiber arts – the Scenic Stitches Spectacle – is currently in the works. This event will provide attendees with the opportunity to play with oversized fiber arts materials, such as oversize weaving, cross stitch with rope rather than thread, a large community embroidery with yarn, and more. The large-scale element should make unexplored techniques less intimidating, encouraging attendees to experiment and play.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.scenicstitches.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scenicstitches
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scenicstitchesfest