“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 →
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 →
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 →
I was trying and failing to steady the skate which I’d hung from the rack on the cieling. The weight of the the boot kept pulling it over. I tightened up the strings now attached to the eyelet hooks, but it wasn’t helping. The object of this delicate balancing and steadying excercise was to get the left boot pointing forwards… Read more →
The Manchelopis arrives here in large, shiny black plastic tightly wrapped bundles that put me in mind of the bales you see wrapped in the fields after haymaking in the summer. It comes that way because the 100g plates of yarn are so voluminous in comparison to normal 100g balls or skeins of yarn, that our standard 15kg order can’t… Read more →
Out of respect for the faithful old-timers who’ve been reading these newsletters for a few years now, I made a decision this year that I’d skip the Woo-hoo-September’s-here! post. Apart from anything else, I suspect your mailboxes are already full of messages from other wool shops telling you how great it is that autumn’s here and it’s time to get… 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 →
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 →
It’s not often that you get to make a link between the lyrics of an anarchist punk band hit from the 90s, the spirit of hand knitting, and a shop window display. Perhaps this is a tenuous one but hear me out. There’s this thing that happens with our knitting – especially sweaters, and especially in the rows and rounds… Read more →
