It goes back to a Saturday evening in Barcelona about a year ago. We all sat around a table in a dimly-lit restaurant: an embroiderer, a piano restorer, a sweater designer, a creator of extraordinary knitted animals and a shopkeeper. Each of us had made a different journey to get there – mine came in the thinly veiled guise of a work trip to visit the Barcelona Wool Show. 

We all had that post-wool-show exhausted glow about us as we shared our stories of what we’d seen and coveted, what we were making, and dreamt of making next. We were a bunch of knitter strangers with 4 different mother-tongues to negotiate, but somehow found a common language – a sort of knitty-european-ish – which only served to warm and woolly our meanings, and conjure up new plans and ideas.

It was an evening out of nowhere – like a ball of wool you didn’t know you had that accidentally rolls out of your project bag – and when you follow it, takes you to new and unexpected somewheres  – so that now just over a year later, we find it has turned up as a little mouse called Sadie Souris who’s decided to make her home in the window of a locked-down wool shop on Lower Clapton Road. 

Sadie Souris was designed by Cinthia Vallet in France, has a wardrobe dyed by The Wool Kitchen in Walthamstow, and is housed by Wild and Woolly in Clapton. Sadie was also made possible by a friendship which began that evening around the dimly-lit table in Barcelona. The unexpected creativity that comes out of being together, now seems like a rare treat from a previous age. But luckily for all of us, it is still working its magic – as is Sadie. The Sadie Souris Kit is the shop’s special holiday project for 2020 and we hope that by making Sadie, she can bring you some of the togetherness and creativity that we’ve missed so much this year.