‘I just don’t have the time. Life is way too busy at the moment’ This familiar response from non-knitting knitwear-admiring friends comes when I gently suggest they could make one too if they learned to knit. Implied here, is that I am lucky not to be so busy and have enough time on my hands to knit. But I am… Read more →
Over a year and a half since the last one, I’m happy to say that Absolute Beginner knitting classes are starting again on 3 October. Or maybe better to say that I’m utterly over the moon about it – which may surprise you given the website’s list of what I’ll be teaching: How to cast on, knit, purl, cast off, sew up.… Read more →
At other times of year, 6 weeks can go by with little to show for the passing of time. But the period that lies between the end of July and beginning of September makes a line in the year which feels to me, not unlike a weather front, or the beginning of a new series. Tone, mood, and rhythm are… Read more →
That the shop becomes quieter in the summer months seems almost too obvious to be worth mentioning. We make things to keep us warm, so our’s is a winter sport – right? The regular recurrence of this sleepy section that the shop settles into over July and August is something I now take for granted. It’s warm outside and therefore… Read more →
It was Christmas Eve 2018. There were a last few last-minuters coming in for row counters and stitch markers to bulk out stockings, but the rush for yarn had passed. I looked around the shop struggling with the immensity of what had to be done over the coming week. Christmas Day was now all that stood between closing up and… Read more →
Carrot cake, lemon cake, chocolate cake.. Gail never arrives at the shop without a cake, her knitting and a smile that lights up the room. She comes from across town in Enfield to sweeten the shop’s monthly Late Night Knitty Lock-in, where she’s got the closest thing we have to a permanent seat reservation. There’s a pleasing pattern to the… Read more →
There was something a little magical about Sabira’s arrival at the Winter 2019 Sweater Club. Never mind that she’d only booked her place hours before it began or that most of the others were already serial sweater club attendees, or that she’d never even been in the shop before. She took a seat and pulled out some astonishingly beautiful deep… Read more →
I think of Cara and I hear the shop door swinging open and see her entering with a slightly perplexed look, and know it’s time to reach for my tape measure. Cara is in persuit of the perfect fit and her persuance of it, shouldn’t be underestimated. Cara’s finished sweaters, of which there are now reassuringly plenty, fit her so… Read more →
Francince Merry walked into the shop on a sunny morning just a few months after I opened in 2014, wearing a fabulously elaborately cabled red jacket, which she quickly explained had recently been featured in a big knitting magazine. She’d already started an even more impressive fairisle sweater by Catherine Earnshaw. I tried and failed to make a literary… Read more →
I’m beginning this series with Helen Eatherton, a prolific and skilled knitter who lives by the Essex coast. I follow her progress by the books and yarns she orders online. Occasionally she’ll rock up in person, quietly and unannounced. Like Mary Poppins she brings a bag from which she pulls out one fabulous completed project after another. She’ll already have… Read more →
