After all these weeks of wondering if this funny little mis-shapen shop will ever be fit for wool, the thrill of finishing the fitting on Sunday was ecstatic. Now it turns out that ecstasy is not the best head state for considered population of new shop with wool. So when I got in on Monday … How to open a wool shop: Part II

Copyright Sylvie Joly In spite of the last month’s disorder, mess and apparent randomness, there are emerging patterns. I pull my bike out of the hallway and round the corner up Isabella Road, nod and smile to the school caretaker having a fag outside the gates, squeeze down the side of the cars backed up … A good ache

To begin with the main challenge with the daily deliveries of parcels was just excercising sufficient self control to hold back from tearing off the brown packing tape  and sinking my sore hands into all that soothing wool. I tried to stash them all in the back store room before temptation got the better of … Untangling the store room

It’s a strange time. Routines are unravelling, my tension refuses to hold steady and the most unlikely work is acquiring knitted characteristics. The last two days started off as a painting project – undercoating, coating and top-coating my shop walls in brilliant white. I made my way up and down the walls… all the way … Knitting a wool shop

It was the mid-80s, a  bright chilly spring-time Sunday – big knitted sweaters, scarves, muddy boots and no coats weather.  Saran,  Gareth and me were hitching from Norwich to RAF Lakenheath to join the protest against Trident. He decided to go ahead on his own so that us two girls had a better chance of … What’s in a name?

This is the story of my journey to a wool shop on Lower Clapton Road, one that I’m so excited about taking that I can scarcely sleep past 5am. That’s the strange bit of not-quite-daytime when my yarn list turns into a dragon that torments me with questions about whether all that DK is a … Wool shop dragons

So it turns out that during all those years I was writing methodical steps for technical How-To materials, there was one crucial bit missing in my understanding of the ‘user’. What if the user obsesses in such fine detail about accomplishing the thing, and has spent so long drifting off to an imagined future where … How to open a wool shop