Remember how much my parents liked Shetland? They are going back at the end of August via overnight train from London and overnight ferry from Aberdeen, bringing one of my Niblings – Barney. Luckily Barney is an enormous fan of travel and especially travel by train. On hearing about this wonderful trip, I invoked The […]
There are many special places in Shetland, but one of my favourites is the road to Heoghland. This single-track road winds its way north from East Burra, hugging the peatlands and the hills, through a wide open landscape dotted with bog-cotton, sphagnum moss and sheep. This is where my friend Caroline walks every single day […]
Greetings from three weeks into the KNITSONIK & Friends Colour to Knit Club! Today I’ve been editing the recording of our second Zoom session and I’m feeling thoroughly inspired. In the enthusiasm of working on the eBook and seeing what everyone else is making, I’ve been happily making my own version of our first club […]
Today our street and several nearby are being resurfaced! Long-term readers who remember #TarmacTuesdays may appreciate my excitement over this process. It’s been amazing to watch and very strange to experience the street with no cars on it and this completely untouched, brand-new surface. The company doing this work posted fliers through all our doors […]
Do you remember when I wrote this post about saving plants from my garden with which to make a basket? Some time back in November I did finally manage to conclude this creative adventure. This hairy little basket is made of ivy, nettles and hazel from my own garden and is just the right size […]
Almost eleven years ago, to celebrate our friend Liz’s upcoming wedding, a few Oxford Bluestockings knitters piled into cars and drove to the dye studio then run by Fyberspates. A very happy afternoon of dyeing ensued. This is all the yarn we dyed that day, on a variety of bases. The sparkly one (I think?) […]
Lately I’ve found myself thinking about The Brownies in which I was enrolled at around seven years old. Here I am making my enrolment pledge and wearing my freshly purchased Brownies uniform… The above photo leaves me with conflicting feelings: it was a little rite of passage and a magic moment for me, yet in […]
There’s a feeling of calm following what has been a busy time completing work on my Knit Stars 6 Masterclass Handout. It ended up pretty much being a book. What can I say? By the time you write introductory text plus short biographies for twelve artists, then add twelve charts in black and white and […]
Things have been quiet here on the blog because all my energy is going into my Knit Stars 6 Masterclass: Think Like An Artist. This class builds on long-standing ideas from my practice around celebrating daily life in stranded colourwork, but it’s also a love-letter to the many artists and makers on whose shoulders my […]
One of many things which makes listening to music so beautiful is space around the notes. The rests, the pauses, the silence, in which pitches and rhythms sound, hang, resonate. On our punch-cards for our componiums, such space shows up as unpunched card, and you get loads of areas where nothing happens. Against the gridded […]