Local shop owner trades in FBI yarns for the knitting kind

Jodie Foster has got nothing on Kathy Carpenter.
Foster might have won an Oscar for her portrayal of FBI Agent Clarice Starling in 1991's The Silence of the Lambs, but Carpenter lived the part.
Further, while Starling's escapades will most likely live forever in the annals of cinematic history, Carpenter's real life adventures will never be known.
"I could tell you what I did," smiles the pleasant, outgoing woman who has just opened a knitting shop in Ruckersville, "but then I'd have to kill you."
Carpenter fulfilled her lifelong dream, she says, when "I hung up my investigator's cap and picked up my needles." She went far beyond picking up needles, leasing space in the Best Western plaza and opening up Pins & Needles, where she intends her customers to be "Pressure-free, in a feel-good kind of shop."
She is also following in the footsteps of her father.
"My father was an engineer with the telephone company. He retired so he could paint," Carpenter says. "He opened up a frame shop. He painted. My mother ran the shop."
She explains that while her father was her artistic inspiration, her mother was her handcraft inspiration.
"My mother did everything. She was a homemaker (who) sewed, crafted and knitted."
Carpenter might have been reared an artist and crafter at heart in Tennessee, but like most such people, she had to make a living before she could follow her heart's desire.
Brought up in Tennessee, she first thought she would be an engineer.
"I won a math scholarship to Vanderbilt University. I stayed two years before I realized that engineering was not my calling after all," she says. After Vanderbilt, it was on to Clemson University in South Carolina to study elementary education, before dropping out of that curriculum after a year.
Job shopping, Carpenter saw an ad for FBI employees, and "thought it would be fun. I loved mysteries and who-done-its."
She also found another inspiration.
While working as a support employee in the FBI's personnel division, she determined to become a full-fledged agent - a position requiring a college degree. While working full time, she attended George Mason University practically full time, earning her degree in psychology in 1985.
But still, before she could become an agent, she had to apply, and the approval process, Carpenter explains, takes awhile.
"I worked on a surveillance team for two years in Washington D.C. I became an agent in the spring of 1987 and worked out of a field office until 1990. Then I transferred to Los Angeles and worked there until 2002."
Carpenter cannot speak of her specific missions, but she can say that she worked bank robberies, white collar crimes, terrorism and foreign counter-intelligence. And, that when she retired in 2002, she became a contract investigator for the federal government.
But that is in the past, and Carpenter is in transition.
While she might share her background with those who come into her shop, she is focused on yarns - fingering yarns, sock yarns, worsted yarns, bulky yarns, and all the yarns in between.
She's got yarns made from wool and cotton and yarns made from a combination of milk and wool and even yarn made completely from corn - which, she says, "is more breathable than cotton." She's got all kinds of patterns and needles, and offers free lessons to beginners "to get people interested."
She will even be hosting Wednesday Knit Nites starting November 19, but that doesn't mean her taste for intrigue is behind her.
"I still have mystery nights at home," says Carpenter, the FBI agent- turned-knitter, whose lifelong priorities have never changed: "They are faith, family and country, in that order."