It was late July 2021 and my phone pinged. A friend Whatsapped me a photo they’d seen online of a guy knitting by the side of a pool. I glanced at the caption long enough to see it was something to do with the Olympics. My phone pinged again. Different friend, same picture. Then it pinged again and again and… Read more →
What’s your favourite bind off? Oh that’s easy – it has to be the tubular bind-off. It’s everything I want in a bind off – lovely stitch work, a last bit of drama before the project is finally over, and a counterintuitively pleasing edge-free edge. But maybe best of all is that it feels like a secret between me and… Read more →
‘Do you think that bit where I went wrong back there, shows? Would you undo it? ‘ This whether-or-not-to-frog question is as much a question about the knitter as it is about the knitting. For the answer involves reading the person and their feelings about their knitting. Mistakenly encourage an eager new knitter to rip it back, and she has to… Read more →
Socks on the beach, cables in the glow of a head torch by a camp fire, zoning out with rounds of plain knitting under a tree by the paddling pool.. summer can be the perfect knitting season. It can also confound us with unexpected challenges, particularly if it’s happening far away from your box of trusty tools, and not within… Read more →
It started quite randomly – a proud photo of an impressive garlic harvest sent by my sister to the family Whatsapp group. A slightly absurd word association game began playing out in my head: garlic… stalks… plaiting… bicycle.. BERET! Now out of the ground, those alliums’ gloriously long green stems plainly needed braiding. And if she was going to be… Read more →
Making and finishing a thing is great. We all know that. But it’s not always easy to get there. It needs lots of stuff to come together at the same time. We need to like what we’re making, who we’re making it for, what we’re making it with, how the stitches go – there needs to be some good-enough balance… Read more →
This week at Wild and Woolly, we have talked about.. ..the eruption of the volcano on St. Vincent and how people who lived in the route of the lava flow and have lost everything, still prefer to stay on the island which they’ve always called home. ..what parts of the knitted stitch you need to push the crochet hook through… Read more →
Last night we took the first step in over a year to revive Knit 15 – our series of niche talks for knitters – with a virtual talks night hosted by this year’s Unravel Festival of Knitting. We plan to get the talks up online for all of you to be able to listen to as soon as possible. In… Read more →
There’s a video clip circulating on YouTube at the moment, from a US talkshow in which Michelle Obama is telling the host, Gayle King, about her newly acquired lockdown knitting habit. King feigns surprise at Obama taking up such an old lady pass-time. Let’s just park that hackneyed old lady knitting cliche for now. Whatever the case Michelle dismisses it with humour and good grace. And… Read more →
It was early January 2020. I’d had 10 days of holiday rest and it was time to go back to work. There was talk on the news about this virus in China but there was talk about a lot of stuff. My mind was on re-opening the shop and getting started on a new plan we had to run a series… Read more →
