It’s uncomplicated and fits everyone – the summer’s blank canvas that everything else goes with, and yes I know you can get them for a song in the shops, but if it’s made from jersey cotton fabric, that means it’s knitted so wouldn’t it be nicer to knit it yourself and make it just the way you’d like it to… Read more →

Blue skies in the shop window are one thing. Making them happen outside and up above – in April – in Clapton – is quite another. It’s that time of year where the only thing you can be sure of weather-wise, is that.. well you can’t really be sure. So Brontë and I have been out on the hunt for… 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 →

Don’t say boring. Do say blank canvas. As the year stretches ahead of us with plenty of cold weather promise, the what-to-knit-next question seems more open endedly tormenting than ever. I have watched my knitter compass swing so wildly left and right of its polar north, that I’ve decided to reach for a safety rail that I already have good… Read more →

All is not as it seems in hand-knit-land today. No sooner do we congratulate a knitter on the beautiful sweater we can see poking out from inside their jacket, than they give us a cheeky wink and reveal that it’s just a knitted neck. Deliciously warm cuffs turn out to be weird sleevey things that have neither upper arms nor… Read more →

Now I know that Halloween is not everyone’s cup of tea – I come from the generation of curmudgeons that bemoans the rise of over-the-top costumes and spray-on spider webs. We’re the ones who look grumpily at the halloween tat in other people’s supermarket trolleys, silently thinking ‘In my day…’ thoughts, with self-righteous re-written memories about carving jack-o-lanterns from real… Read more →

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 →

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 →

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 →