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 →

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 →

I think it began with the Azor, a 4ply cardigan that I started last summer. I’d sped through the beautiful colourwork yoke in less than a week, but something about the on-and-on-and-on of those tiny same-same stitches in the body turned it into a sweater that trawled through treacle to get finished. So that got me to thinking that if… Read more →

If you ever take a 106 bus north up Cambridge Heath road towards Clapton you’ll know to expect a little delay when the bus pulls into the stop after the bridge over Regent’s Canal. “This bus will wait for a short time for a change of drivers to take place” says London Transport’s disembodied voice over the tannoy. The door… 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 →

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 →

By all accounts Sisyphus was a pretty crafty guy and not in a nice way: He plotted to kill his brother, seduced his niece and then twice managed to scheme his way out of dying and exiting through the underworld as he was supposed to. Not surprisingly this didn’t go down well with the gods which is how he got… Read more →