With April Foolery nonsense safely behind us (and our dreams of a 4 storey wool shop on Oxford Street still floating around on a cloud for someone else to make real one day), I’m happy to say that this week’s newsletter is firmly anchored at feet-on-the-ground-street-level. There’s very little I regret about the change I made when I decided to… Read more →
More accustomed to celebrating small-scale, slow-pace making, I’m both thrilled and not a little nervous to reveal our latest and truly gigantic news..You may want to grab a hold of your project bag and check bus routes to the West End – For the month of April, Wild and Woolly is taking over the old Debenhams building in Oxford Street,… Read more →
I have a confession to make. I don’t always swatch.I know I know I know. How can you trust a knitting shop keeper who doesn’t always stick with the (swatching) programme? In my defense my swatch-knitting slackness is mostly confined to projects with yarns that I’ve used before or things where the size doesn’t really matter that much.But in the course… Read more →
In the shop-as-sweater-project version of life, this time of year often feels like we’re fast approaching the stitch marker at the end of a mightily long round. It’s a time for unfurling the fabric and seeing where you’ve got to, delighting in your nicely opposite leaning increases, and the fuzzy halo that’s hovering above the stitches. My shop keeper-ish equivalent… Read more →
Followers of the shop on social media will know already that the last couple of weeks have not been our finest. A robbery on Guy Fawkes night left the shop full of shattered glass and missing some critical pieces of office machinery. One of my first tasks after taking it all in, was to hastily write an instagram and facebook… Read more →
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 →
‘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 →
