perennial/pəˈrɛnɪəl/adjective1.lasting or existing for a long or apparently infinite time; enduring or continually recurring.“that sweater has a perennial appeal“ The year is on the turn in that way that makes Brontë and I both feel the pull of the familiar – those patterns you come back to again and again. Where does their enduring appeal come from? Honestly, we’re not… Read more →
The sun was low in the sky, casting an orange light around the room. I’d woken up from an afternoon nap on the couch. We were in an old Ottoman apartment block beside the Gelata tower and I could hear the muezzin’s call to prayer outside and the faint whirr of the AC unit above me. I picked up my… Read more →
Welcome to the last summer pattern round-up of 2024. Compact, cool, light and fun: this is the side-pocket-of-your-rucksack challenge – trains, planes and automobile-friendly patterns. We’ve been on the hunt for projects that will work on a beach, in the park and in pyjamas during those really slow holiday breakfasts. So if that long-suffering unfinished sweater won’t fit in with… Read more →
There’s a ready-made versus hand knitted discussion I’m often roped into, which starts off revolving around the price we pay for the wool we knit our sweaters with. Mostly it goes along the lines of.. ‘Wouldn’t it be cheaper to buy it ready made?!’. ..followed by me conceding that ‘Yes it would’, but with the caveat that if it’s cheaper… Read more →
“But what does the actual measurement mean? And what even is a measurement that isn’t actual? Does that mean sweaters have a pretend measurement aswell?” Ok, I hear you. It’s confusing. We need to talk about Ease. “Hmm, I thought I was asking about actual measurements. But if you would rather talk about ease, we can do that too but… Read more →
Yes, Part 5 means that there are another 4 that came before, but don’t panic – they happened last summer and the summer before that and we have them all listed here so you don’t have to hunt them out. Plus thanks to the timelessness of the super designs we found back then, they’re still just as good to knit… Read more →
Julius is a cavernous minimalist restaurant that has the look of a place which other people eat at. But when I go in and take a seat there’s a comforting background hubub of indistinct voices that somehow disarms all the high ceilinged, mid-century blah blah. I’m in the Wedding district of Berlin, sitting at a large round table next to… Read more →
We know that knitting monogamy is not for everyone. Unlike human partners, knitting which gets passed over for a while in favour of another project, doesn’t experience feelings of abandonment or jealousy (as far as I know). And far from slowing things down, plenty of knitters hold that working on several projects simultaneously means there’s always a suitable project to… Read more →
Weird, curious and baffling but also brilliant and often beautiful: there’s a niche category of knits which Brontë and I reserve a special fondness for – the ones which take us in an unexpected direction on account of the designer’s imaginative construction genius. These are the patterns which get you there and do it marvellously but which veer away from… Read more →
..And then the shop opened. Knitters heard that there was a new yarn store in Hackney and the non-knitters also wanted to see what was going on in that place with the kooky things in the window. They pushed the door open and came in: shawled, scarved and some not wrapped up at all, fairisled, cabled and some just plain.… Read more →
