Anna

Meet the maker

The four seasons – now in colour!

“I sometimes think it would be nice to tell my grandma about everything I do now with the foraging and the dyeing. It comes from what she and my grandad taught me.“ Emma Kylmala, also known as The Town Dyer, is a Finnish plant dyer who has made her home in west London. She’s talking …

Meet the maker

A dance on the surface of your knitting

“I’d see her through the window when I came home from school. She’d sit by the window where there was good light, with a big basket full of mending” Judit Gummlich describes how it was when her beloved grandmother came to stay, to help with taking care of her and her siblings while her mother …

Knitsplaining

The Madonna of the Yarn Winder

Is there really a Madonna of the Yarn Winder? Well there’s a painting with that name by Leonardo Da Vinci that shows the Madonna, her naked child and something that looks like a niddy noddy meets drop spindle contraption. It’s had a bit of an adventurous time lately – stolen by robbers disguised as policemen …

Life in the day of a wool shop

Overheard in the woolshop this week

So much for autumn. The somersaulting seasons of the UK have just landed us back in high summer again, with the hottest temperatures all year. For us knitters, this is more than a little bit disruptive and disorienting. And even more so for pedlars of wool like Brontë and I. For this week you will …

The shop

Which way for Autumn?

It’s clouded over, we’re wearing socks again and there’s that lanyard-swinging deliberateness in the way that people are walking down the street. September seems to have missed the memo about breaking us in gently. Autumn is here and the forecast is decidedly woolly. How does this make you feel? A) It’s totally unjust. The summer’s …

What I'm thinking about when I'm knitting

Come steek with me..

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 …

Pattern round-ups

Knit Your Own Summer Part 4

This final part of our KYOS series for 2023 is a travel edit, specially for weekend-awayers, back packers, cycle tourers, and last-minute-trippers. These are your Green Eggs and Ham knits – good on a train, good in the rain, good in a car and good in a tree. For these are the projects that will …

Knitsplaining

The Resourceful Knitter’s Guide to the Summer (revised and updated!)

This guide first appeared in 2021, since when we have had the good fortune to get even better at our barefoot knitting skills. And given how many new knitters may be travelling with their knitting for the first time this summer, it feels like high time we posted a revised version of the guide.. Socks …

Travels with knitting

The Berlin Wool

The sunflower yellow S-bahn arced its way around an elevated sweep of railway, like a welcoming smile on platform 15 of the Berlin Hauptbanhof. There’s a disarming low-key-ness to arriving in a new country by train – no passports, luggage collection or international arrivals paraphernalia – just a platform change for the metro to finish …

Pattern round-ups

Knit Your Own Summer Part 3

What about Parts 1 & 2: you can’t just kick off with Part 3! Ha Hah! Just as I suspected. You’ve totally forgotten about the summer pattern round-ups we did last year. All part of my cunning plan to remind you that we have lots of round-ups available on the website for your easy reference …