I know I am really lucky to be able to walk outside for an hour or so, every single day. But though I love my daily walks, I have of late rather missed walking much further, in the hills. A few days ago, I had a sudden urge to go for a good long walk…
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One punning moment last December, I decided it might be fun to knit the familiar homonyms – yoke and yolk – into an egg-themed sweater. So please behold – my YOLK YOKE. Yes, I am standing in a frozen landscape dressed as a fried egg – what of it? There are so many egg-cellent things…
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Hello and welcome to our Wednesday My Place post! Today’s contribution is something really special, and I’m very excited to introduce it! First of all, the design is the kind of shawl I really like: bold and graphic in appearance, but with lots of variety and some novel features that keep the knitting interesting. Next,…
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Welcome to our Wednesday My Place post! I’ve been thinking a lot about knitting and time of late: Knitting takes time, makes it, and reflects it, and I’ve noticed that knitters have recently been using their projects in a range of really interesting ways to mark time’s passing. Some of these projects seem to be…
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There are many creative handywomen I admire here in Scotland, and today I’m really happy to introduce you to one of them: Flora Collingwood-Norris. A super-talented designer of knitwear (of whose palette I’ve long been a huge fan), over the past couple of years, Flora has proudly advocated both the value of making, and the…
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Welcome to the very first post from our My Place project! We’re kicking things off with a designer who I’m sure is already familiar to many of you – Virginia Sattler-Reimer. I’ve never met Virginia in person, but I feel like I’ve “known” her forever: she’s one of those people I eagerly followed back in…
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We seem to be in the middle of a fairly sustained cold snap in our part of Scotland. Icy days have been followed by snowy ones, with bitter temperatures and freezing fog. I personally like quite chilly weather, and particularly enjoy its transformative effect on my surrounding landscape. During a cold spell, everything starts to…
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Hello! We are currently enjoying a very quiet and relaxing winter break. In the absence of any socialising, this has largely involved good food, lots of films and books, knitting (me), creating digital soundscapes from ordinary household objects (Tom) and crisp long walks (both of us, plus dogs). After an extended period of hard work,…
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Simply because of where we live, this year has, I think, not been tough as it has proved for so many other people. I feel enormously grateful to be able to just step outside and go for a walk in wonderful rural scenery directly from our front door. And for me personally, the importance of…
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There is no getting away from the fact that, whatever business you are in, this year has been a very weird one. Having to change the nature and direction of what you are doing – often very rapidly – is never an easy thing, and this year there have been so many of those changes.…
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It has been a very wet and cool July. As our Spring was unusually dry and warm, the garden has definitely appreciated the wet weather, and apart from having to wear the dreaded rain pants on my long daily walks, I’ve rather enjoyed it too. Certainly there is something rather jolly about hearing the rain…
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I’ve been thinking about how I might incorporate local found materials into the pieces I’m making for my Crafting Futures collaboration with Pilar. So, for the past couple of months, I have been picking up the feathers I come across on my daily walks. I’ve not done anything special when gathering these feathers – I’ve…
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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been really struck by how colourful the oak trees I see on my morning walks are at this time of year, with their wild orangey-red foliage so different to the surrounding trees heavy green. So here’s a poem I wrote in my head about those oaks this morning. The…
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hello! Sorry to disappear there: sometimes a migraine can really slay me, and that’s definitely been the case with this one. As well as feeling utterly exhausted, I’ve really needed to rest my eyes, so I have spent most of this past week away from the computer screen. It is funny how not sitting at…
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Here, at Carbeth, we live in a landscape underwritten by many rich and complex human stories. Neolithic people lived and travelled through Carbeth many thousand of years ago and, since these early settlers, this landscape has many stories of passage to tell, from seventeenth-century cattle drovers, to nineteenth-century railway navvies, to the walkers on today’s…
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Good morning! Wow! I really enjoyed your myriad button views! It was fascinating to read through all your comments and I really appreciated hearing so many different perspectives! But it was especially intriguing to me that the blue buttons came out so far on top. I kind of agree with the majority view: the blue…
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