Deliveries, boxes and unpacking: The last weeks have sometimes felt like we are taking delivery of autumn itself – just in a woollen form. Parcels make their long way west across Europe and south from Scotland and the north of England. Our missing colourways are restocked and we finally get to welcome the 3 new yarns we’ve been working hard… Read more →
“I sometimes think it would be nice to tell my grandma about everything I do now with the foraging and the dyeing. It comes from what she and my grandad taught me.“ Emma Kylmala, also known as The Town Dyer, is a Finnish plant dyer who has made her home in west London. She’s talking to me about the origins… Read more →
“I’d see her through the window when I came home from school. She’d sit by the window where there was good light, with a big basket full of mending” Judit Gummlich describes how it was when her beloved grandmother came to stay, to help with taking care of her and her siblings while her mother was working. “She embroidered little… Read more →
Is there really a Madonna of the Yarn Winder? Well there’s a painting with that name by Leonardo Da Vinci that shows the Madonna, her naked child and something that looks like a niddy noddy meets drop spindle contraption. It’s had a bit of an adventurous time lately – stolen by robbers disguised as policemen and eventually returned to the… Read more →
So much for autumn. The somersaulting seasons of the UK have just landed us back in high summer again, with the hottest temperatures all year. For us knitters, this is more than a little bit disruptive and disorienting. And even more so for pedlars of wool like Brontë and I. For this week you will have found us unwraping the… Read more →
It’s clouded over, we’re wearing socks again and there’s that lanyard-swinging deliberateness in the way that people are walking down the street. September seems to have missed the memo about breaking us in gently. Autumn is here and the forecast is decidedly woolly. How does this make you feel? A) It’s totally unjust. The summer’s been lousy. It’s already getting… Read more →
The summer holiday knitting project dilemma has become as familiar as the smell of cocount sunscreen in my getting-ready-to-go-away story. There’s an irony here given just how much of June, July and August I spend researching and peddling advice to others about what will work on holiday. Surely mine should be a well informed surgical strike at the perfect project?… Read more →
This final part of our KYOS series for 2023 is a travel edit, specially for weekend-awayers, back packers, cycle tourers, and last-minute-trippers. These are your Green Eggs and Ham knits – good on a train, good in the rain, good in a car and good in a tree. For these are the projects that will sqoodge down enough to fit… Read more →
This guide first appeared in 2021, since when we have had the good fortune to get even better at our barefoot knitting skills. And given how many new knitters may be travelling with their knitting for the first time this summer, it feels like high time we posted a revised version of the guide.. Socks on the beach, cables in… Read more →
