“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 →
The sunflower yellow S-bahn arced its way around an elevated sweep of railway, like a welcoming smile on platform 15 of the Berlin Hauptbanhof. There’s a disarming low-key-ness to arriving in a new country by train – no passports, luggage collection or international arrivals paraphernalia – just a platform change for the metro to finish the journey. It was 7am… Read more →
What about Parts 1 & 2: you can’t just kick off with Part 3! Ha Hah! Just as I suspected. You’ve totally forgotten about the summer pattern round-ups we did last year. All part of my cunning plan to remind you that we have lots of round-ups available on the website for your easy reference including.. Knit Your Own Summer… Read more →
A knitter walks into a wool shop. They undo their jacket to reveal an astonishingly beautiful and complicatedly cabled cardigan which has the look of espaliered apple trees interlaced with roses. They take off their delightfully fairisled beret and unwrap a deliberately unevenly striped scarf and lay them on a chair. Both are patterned with complementary shades of left over… Read more →
