..on a similarly sunny April morning, I pushed the shutter up and unlocked the door of 116 Lower Clapton Road and wedged the door open with the fire extinguisher. The shop was open to the public for the first time. I placed 4 glass jars in the window, and set each one next to a wooden box of balls of… Read more →
It was clear as soon as we began unpacking the Harvest Hues skeins from the latest John Arbon delivery that we were in the company of a whole load more than the 400 meters on the 100g skein band. There’s a totally unexpected toothiness to the yarn which is concealed by its lustre – a characteristic more common in drapier… Read more →
“The only mistakes we make”, we’re told, “are the ones we fail to learn from”. So what was the lesson here? A mis-stranded skein of yarn was unknowingly loaded onto the swift for ball winding. In a matter of seconds, the whole thing was a snarled up spaghetti-like mess of tangles. The customer smiled nervously about an appointment she had… Read more →
We used to keep a pile of mending when I was a child, for my granny to do when she came to visit. It was a mixture of ripped and knee-worn jeans, holey elbowed sweaters, socks and tights where the toes poked through, accidentally torn shirts and so on. My granny sat in good light with my mum’s well equipped… Read more →
Knitters count and they do it a lot: we count ourselves all around necks, yokes, bodies and sleeves, we count our way through elaborate lace repeats in shawls, we count our way up the crowns of hats, and down to the turning of heels, so why is it so confusing to count out how many balls of wool are needed… Read more →
Regardless who comes and what brought them here, the Absolute Beginners knitting class always seems to end with the sense that something wonderous happened in the course of the hours it took. And so in spite of my habitual nerves about whether my teaching will get everyone through, I have come to trust that the elixir of learning something new,… Read more →
“Oooh it must be lovely working in a wool shop. I’d love to have a job where I got to sit around and knit all day.” I’d love a job like that too. But I have to level with you – and I’m really sorry if this breaks the wool shop spell – we don’t get to sit around doing… Read more →
We’d been getting requests for months, or possibly even years, before I finally caved and did a round-up – about this time last year I think – of sweater patterns on Ravelry that would make reasonably good matches for Toast’s ready-to-wear knitwear collection. Why the resistance? Well it’s complicated. Picking out patterns that are a match for sweaters we can… Read more →
Why must love be something we fall into? After all it doesn’t sit below us. With you, it felt more like somewhere we climbed to. There was no falling with us. When I think of how we became, it was like we got wrapped and twisted into love. I pulled you over my head into love and pushed my arms… Read more →
For a serial procrastinator like me, deadlines can be equal parts terrifying and reassuring: On the one hand there’s the enormousness of how overwhelming the task looks. On the other hand there’s that indisputable truth, of a date not that far away, when it simply must be done, which holds the promise of a time when you’ll no longer have… Read more →
