| There was a time in the early days of the shop that I kept a clipboard next to the till. It had a biro tied on with some red twine, and its mighty spring-loaded clip held an unruly wodge of dog-eared sheets of paper, neatly lined and full of differently hand-written names. I used it to collect email addresses of visiting customers who wanted to receive this newsletter. It created an oddly analogue extra step in getting your names into the subscriber database. It also meant that I got to say hello to new knitter-subscribers, to hear about what you were making, and how you found yourselves in a small wool shop in Clapton. These were tiny conversations but never inconsequential. Through them I learned who I was writing to, and who my shop was for. The clipboard is now long-since gone as most knitters subscribe themselves through a webform on their phones without having to negotiate the buses and puddles on Lower Clapton Road or the dangly biro. And so I thought it might be fun to introduce you to the shop that you have possibly never visited, but that comes to visit you in this newsletter every few weeks: Welcome to Wild and Woolly.. |
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| ..a shop for tools, yarn and projects, where you can become a knitter and cultivate your own knitterliness. There’s help with yarn and needle choosing if you need it, and also with stitch fixing, pattern deciphering and project finishing. In normal times we have monthly Late Night Knitty Lock-ins, irregular Long Tail Book Club story-readings-while-you-knit, and niche talks for knitters that get recorded for the Knit15 Podcast. We also have a big wooden ball winder for winding your wool and a teapot so you can have tea while you wait. So if we haven’t met before (or haven’t met for a while), I hope that now the shop is open again, we’ll have a chance to do that soon, and in the meanwhile you can better imagine the place where your parcels get packed and where I sit down to write to you every once in a while. |