In the Spring of 2017 our family moved to Cottars, the wonky, renovation project of a cottage we had fallen in love with and bought earlier that year. Ever since our son was born ten years ago, our little family boat has been rather at the mercy of storms built up far away in the… Read More Cottars Almanac: September Mitts
This week, in schools across England, the same scene will have been repeated. All the paperwork and equipment that has been so vital for so much of the year will suddenly be competing for space in bins and skips as everyone clears out and strips down, ready for the new school year. The school where… Read More Four Things I’ve Learned From Being A Maker
Beware of living blissfully in an online bubble. Until fairly recently, if you’d asked me I’d have said that the online knitting world I was part of was a friendly, inclusive place. Sure, it was a bit low on men and maybe not as culturally mixed as it could be, but that wasn’t for want… Read More Yarn is Yarn
Last month I bought a bikini and lost a battle. If your social media habits cover similar territory to mine, you may well have seen increasing discussion and debate surrounding body positivity in recent times. In my case, the inestimable @playfulday has done much to raise my awareness and provoke thought in me about the… Read More Battling in a Bikini
Well, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but I’ve finally got around to recording my first ever podcast. Then spent far too long working out how to edit/convert it (the latter takes so long to do I had time to wind yarn and cast on a cardigan). In this first episode I… Read More Podcast!
My reaction to the news of the Grenfell Tower fire earlier in the month was, like so many others, shock, then heart-ache, then the desire to do something positive. To try and let those affected know that they are cared about, somehow. Donating money for support is the first obvious (and obviously useful) reaction, but… Read More Knit Two Together
Out of my window looking in the night, I can see the barges’ flickering light. Starboard shines green and port is showing red, I can see them flickering from my bed. I grew up in a small town on the Thames. Not the bucolic, pretty, pre-London Thames where willows trail in the water and stockbrokers… Read More Port and Starboard
What happens in the lambing shed one year affects the year to come in so many ways and what happens in the wider world affects the fortunes of those in the lambing shed too, but in that silence it was simple. We waited. A couple of years ago, at the farm belonging to my father… Read More Lambing Shed
“If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish.” Charles Dickens For the best part of the last decade I lived in Cumbria. With access to some of the best walking country in the world and within the rather reduced world of being a parent to young children, I discovered… Read More Tinner’s Way
‘”But it may be fine- I expect it will be fine” said Mrs Ramsay, making some little twist of the reddish-brown stocking she was knitting, impatiently. If she finished it tonight, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy…’ Virginia Woolf… Read More To The Lighthouse
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