Anna

What I'm thinking about when I'm knitting

Ode to My Socks

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 …

Life in the day of a wool shop

Overheard in the wool shop

“Oooh it must be lovely working in a wool shop. I’d love to have a job where I got to sit around and knit all day.” I’d love a job like that too. But I have to level with you – and I’m really sorry if this breaks the wool shop spell – we don’t …

Pattern round-ups

Another round of toast?

We’d been getting requests for months, or possibly even years, before I finally caved and did a round-up – about this time last year I think – of sweater patterns on Ravelry that would make reasonably good matches for Toast’s ready-to-wear knitwear collection. Why the resistance? Well it’s complicated. Picking out patterns that are a …

What I'm thinking about when I'm knitting

Love letter to a sweater

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 …

The shop

Uncountable Values

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 …

Life in the day of a wool shop

Into the beyond

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 shop

Hello, How’s your knitting?

In the door-swinging-open course of the shop day with all it’s ‘How-are-you-and-how’s-that-sweater-going?’ conversations, it’s easy to forget that there are a whole bunch of knitters out there who get wool from us who have no idea who we are, for every knitter we talk things through with in the shop, there’s always another one who …

Pattern round-ups

Sweaters plain and simple

Don’t say boring. Do say blank canvas. As the year stretches ahead of us with plenty of cold weather promise, the what-to-knit-next question seems more open endedly tormenting than ever. I have watched my knitter compass swing so wildly left and right of its polar north, that I’ve decided to reach for a safety rail …

The shop

I’m sorry are you open?

Yes we’re open come on in! Don’t you wonder why people keep asking if you’re open even when the Open sign is on the door? I’m not being funny or anything, but normal shops feel.. well.. just a bit more shoppish. What do you mean? Are you saying that Wild and Woolly isn’t a normal …

Life in the day of a wool shop

A year in the life of a wool shop window

“Oh is that the shop with the funny window displays?“ Hmm, do you mean funny-ha-ha or funny-peculiar? Sometimes I think the shop is better known by outsiders for the antics that go on in the window than for its wool. Whatever the case, it’s reassuring to know that the window display is speaking to folks …