If you ever take a 106 bus north up Cambridge Heath road towards Clapton you’ll know to expect a little delay when the bus pulls into the stop after the bridge over Regent’s Canal. “This bus will wait for a short time for a change of drivers to take place” says London Transport’s disembodied voice over the tannoy. The door… Read more →
“They are the most beautiful sheep you’ve ever seen. Both the ewes and the rams have amazing horns – a sort of swept-back affair.” Jenn Monohan is talking to me from her home in Elsing, a small village in Norfolk where she runs her yarn business, Fibreworkshop. She’s telling me about the Norfolk Horn sheep whose fleece she uses for… Read more →
Fairy lights in shop windows and forlorn looking pumpkins in wheely bins have appeared like signposts warning us that we’re nearly there. Halloween is over, fireworks are beginning to pop, and the gift-knitting deadline is almost in view. Now I know there are knitters out there that are well prepared for the year’s sprint finish: they came in for gift-knitting… Read more →
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 →
