Here at the International Institute for Picking your Next Knitting Project, we encounter many personality types in our clients.. The Disciplined Knitter: has an ordered project queue which they go through systematically, periodically rearranging it and adding to it as projects are finished. This knitter is monogamous, finishing one project before starting another. They closely watch favourite designers and keep… Read more →

I once took a train from a tiny station on the north coast of Brittany where I’d arrived by sailing boat from Jersey. It was a small wooden hall with a short shrub pitted platform outside. There were no waiting passengers and the interior was completely empty save for two glass fronted counters on opposite sides of the station hall:… Read more →

We hear a lot these days about the therapeutic benefits of knitting. Amongst other things it’s claimed that knitting can lower blood pressure, reduce depression and anxiety, slow the onset of dementia, even be a distraction from chronic pain and reduce loneliness and isolation.  But I’ve got to level with you. It’s not always like that.  When Elizabeth Zimmerman wrote… Read more →

“I love this teal-y blue. It’s so beautiful. It’s such a shame I can’t wear it.” There is a version of this colour choosing agony we go through most days of the week in the shop. Sometimes it starts with a list of colours which were approved as skin tone compliant by a bossy friend or Getting-your-colours-done session. Other times… Read more →

More accustomed to celebrating small-scale, slow-pace making, I’m both thrilled and not a little nervous to reveal our latest and truly gigantic news..You may want to grab a hold of your project bag and check bus routes to the West End – For the month of April, Wild and Woolly is taking over the old Debenhams building in Oxford Street,… Read more →

I have a confession to make. I don’t always swatch.I know I know I know. How can you  trust a knitting shop keeper who doesn’t always stick with the (swatching) programme? In my defense my swatch-knitting slackness is mostly confined to projects with yarns that I’ve used before or things where the size doesn’t really matter that much.But in the course… Read more →

What’s your favourite bind off? Oh that’s easy – it has to be the tubular bind-off. It’s everything I want in a bind off – lovely stitch work, a last bit of drama before the project is finally over, and a counterintuitively pleasing edge-free edge. But maybe best of all is that it feels like a secret between me and… Read more →

‘I just don’t have the time. Life is way too busy at the moment’ This familiar response from non-knitting knitwear-admiring friends comes when I gently suggest they could make one too if they learned to knit. Implied here, is that I am lucky not to be so busy and have enough time on my hands to knit. But I am… Read more →