As we approach the start of Knitting Season, I thought I’d write a few posts about how I use (and have used) journals. I imagine many of us think about journals as deeply personal spaces, and yet my most formative experience of journal keeping was collective and not individual. (Because this story belongs to others… Read More
Hello, here is my new hair, and my new cardigan. For quite a while it has been obvious (to me at least) that my hair was no longer naturally brown, but grey. I got to a point a few months ago when I was just tired of the continual touching up. What might my hair… Read More
This week, the West Highland Way Club passes through Strathendrick and Strathblane, close to where I live. I walk through these beautiful valleys (or straths) every single day, enjoying the changing seasons and my surroundings. It is a landscape of great variety: the bare muir blooms with colourful flowers, pasture meets rocky outcrop, and verdant… Read More
I have been so inspired by Ottar (see yesterday’s post) that I decided to name my latest design for her – the Ottar hap. This is a hap I’ve had a notion to knit since I started working on The Book of Haps about eighteen months ago. As I researched Shetland hap construction, I became… Read More
Working on a book can be full of surprises. I did not think, when I set out to write a chapter about tools and objects and the way my attitude to the material world changed after my stroke, that I would end up being inspired by an amazing feminist anarcho-syndicalist . . . but weirdly… Read More
Apart from marrying Tom, the other highlight of 2015 for me was the Seven Skeins Club, and the feedback we’ve since had from many members suggest that they really enjoyed it too. Through the club, I was able to launch our newly-developed yarn (a completely new venture for me), create a new book, and have… Read More
(over the bridge to the BBC at Pacific Quay . . . ) I am about to take a much-needed break, but just had to pop in and tell you about my forthcoming interview for BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. I’ve been listening to Woman’s Hour since I was a teenager, and the voices of… Read More
Panel 94: Hill and Adamson The silver herrings and striped petticoats of the Newhaven fisherwoman. In the comments on yesterday’s post, Heather linked to an interesting take on the “when is a tapestry not a tapestry” question from a tapestry weaver who strongly objects to the misappropriation of the term in reference to non-woven textiles.… Read More
When Susan Gibbs recently contacted me to ask me if I’d like to be involved in a new project, I already knew I would say yes. I love everything that Susan does at Juniper Moon Farm, and was thrilled to have an opportunity to work with her. But when she explained precisely what this project… Read More
On Friday evening, Tom and I went to see Neeme Järvi conducting the RSNO in Shostakovitch’s 7th. I don’t think I have ever seen the Usher Hall so full – there wasn’t a spare seat to be seen – with many emotional Russians among the audience. Personally, I think it is very hard not to… Read More
I do hope that all of you reading this blog realise, by now, just how important you have all been to me over the past year. It has been a very strange and challenging time for me, but you have all been there every difficult step of the way. It has helped me enormously to… Read More
I am becoming obsessed with the elaborately starched and stripey ‘costume’ of the Newhaven fishwives – and what it says about the ways in which the hard lives of working women might be reinvented as romance. These mass-produced ornaments were extremely popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They come in several varieties, and… Read More
