It’s customary at this end-of-the-row time of year to abandon our usual story-telling and let the windows tell their tales of the year that’s passed: A yarnie potting shed of budding flowers, a mysterious bicycle that cycles wool and rainbows through the night, a shower of knitting needle rain, a banner of hope knitted by the mighty diaspora of East… Read more →
I opened the shop on Monday morning to a smell that seemed to come from a time before this one. The source was in the back room – a not-washed-up preserving pan sticky with the dregs of mulled wine made to keep Saturday’s patiently queueing customers, warm. The smell was sweet, a bit orangey and slightly clovey. The last time… Read more →
The shop gets awfully noisy at this time of year. I had to ask a caller to speak up on the phone yesterday against a background din of the reciept printer that was churning out a mile-long scroll of customer orders. Meanwhile the tape dispenser was burping its mechanical grrtttt noise at regular intervals as Vicky wrapped up the parcels.… Read more →
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… Read more →
King Arthur’s was round, the Apostles’ was long, Number 10’s is oval. Tables and their shapes are important – they define the space and say something about what gets done around there. When I searched for the table for knitters to sit around in the shop, I knew I wanted it to feel like everyone fitted there. The one I… Read more →
I count my stitches two at a time, others take them singly or in fives. I watch perfectly fluent English speakers whisper numbers in their mother toungue as they thumb their way along the stitches. We each have our own habitual ways of doing it, but counting is a part of what all knitters do. It’s how we find out… Read more →
There’s a wool shop keeper-as-midwife analogy that feels apt when I think about my role in delivering new knitters to the world through the shop. Almost as thrilling as the delivery, is the the knitter’s return to the shop with their completed knitting when they’re ready to show me how things worked out. We hold the fabric together and I… Read more →
This time of year is full of questions.. like how many stitches to cast on for a scarf, how to avoid curling edges, or what to do about joining in a new ball of wool etc.. And although I know there are multiple solutions to any one of those problems, I’ve learned that new knitters prefer an unambiguous do-it-like-this answer,… Read more →
Wild and Woolly [ wahyld-n-woo l-ee ] ‘to be carrying a wild look, to have a bearded and dirty look, to be lawless, to be uncultured’ I tend to think that the reason I’m almost never asked about the origin of the shop’s name is because the name is so obviously the right one, that there’s no question that it could… Read more →
I tend to have three types of customer: those who can knit, those who can’t but want to knit, and those who love someone else who knits. There is also a fourth category of non-knitting passers by who have no interest in knitting but would like to buy the finished knitwear they can see in the shop, but as it’s… Read more →
