After nearly four decades, Sue Hillier has sold Sue Ellen Drapery to a local buyer and will leave the High Street store at the end of January.

"I think everybody's got the hint once we put a 50 per cent sale on," she told The Border Mail this week.

"When COVID was on, I had a few weeks off and I enjoyed my time off. You know yourself when you've had enough.

"I've got all these grandkids, I need to spoil them."

But while she was deciding this, Victoria's second lockdown included mandatory masks and the drapery received probably thousands of orders within days.

"I had all these friends come in and help me make masks," Mrs Hillier said.

"We were starting at 3 o'clock in the morning and we were working until 10pm.

"We did that for about three days and we thought, 'no, this is stupid', so we started about 4 o'clock in the morning and at 8pm that was it, we're going home.

"The big demand's died off but we've still got masks in the shop and we sell masks every day."

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In 1981, Mrs Hillier, now 59, had a job at the supermarket when her boss returned from an extended holiday.

"I was running the place for six months, practically, it's a bit hard working for someone again," she recalled.

"And the drapery in the town had closed down, so I decided, 'Oh, we'll give that a go, and see how it goes, I might do five years and move on', but 39 years later, we're still here."

To get started, she and her mother drove to Melbourne and bought items at auction and from warehouses.

"Came back with a car full of stuff and put it around the shop and thought, 'that looks pretty good'," she said.

"Every couple of months off we'd go, whatever we'd make, I'd go back down and spend again, so yeah, we just built it up from that.

"The first year I went strawberry picking because I didn't have enough money to survive on."

With no particular background in needlecraft, Mrs Hillier admitted to "a little bit of a learning curve".

"People would come and ask can I repair things, and I would go, 'I don't know, I'm only 19, I don't know how to do this'," she laughed.

TAFE courses and other training quickly filled those gaps and now Sue Ellen Drapery attracts customers from across the North East as well as tourists.

Over the years Mrs Hillier and husband Michael (Mick) raised three sons and a daughter, with 10 grandchildren now also on the scene.

"One of the grandchildren told me the other day, he's six, he goes, 'Nan, when you sell this shop, I'm coming to have a sleepover for five days'," she said.

"When they come, we sew or we cook or we do something but it's always such a rush, it will be just nice to take your time about it."

Mrs Hillier always valued the company that came with running a small town shop, remembering with warmth the older ladies who popped in for a cuppa and cake, many of whom have since died.

The enforced break this year allowed her rare space for reflection.

"It makes you start thinking there's more to life than just working all the time," she said.

"I need to be doing something else now for me."