Yarn Library

To avoid travelling to London to buy beautiful yarn, Jane Abraham opened a yarn shop in Cornwall. A perfectly reasonable solution, if you ask me. Jane runs Stitches & Cream in Falmouth and is also known as The Cornish Knitter. As she prepares to close the physical shop and continue the business online, we talk about building a place where people feel welcome, the realities of running it and what she wants to do next. We discuss giving advice without making a sale, supporting small yarn pr...

What would you do if you were feeling anxious and needed a small, manageable project? If you're Annah O'Leary, apparently the answer is to design an enormous blanket made from 144 colourwork squares. Even though you've never finished a colourwork project before! Annah is the designer behind Needle & Feather and author of Knit an Heirloom Blanket. In this episode, we talk about how her extraordinary blanket began as a way of finding small moments of achievement, and how it grew into someth...

What can a knitting pattern teach you, and what can only be learned by understanding your own knitting? Patty Lyons joins me for a frank, funny and thought-provoking conversation about the skills that exist beyond the written instructions. Modern patterns can help knitters tackle projects that might once have felt impossible. But when every technique and decision is explained for us, do we lose some of the curiosity, experimentation and problem-solving that make us more capable knitters? Patt...

This week, I’m joined by Charlotte Stone, better known as StoneKnits, the designer and author whose wonderfully playful colourwork socks have become instantly recognisable. Charlotte didn’t set out with a strategy to become “the sock designer”. She simply kept knitting the things she loved, sharing them online and responding when people asked for the patterns. Then her toadstool socks took off, a Bernie Sanders-inspired pattern reached the top of Ravelry and a publisher came calling. We talk ...

This week, I’m joined by Melanie Berg, the knitwear designer behind Mairlynd. I first met Melanie when I accidentally attended one of her shawl-design classes entirely in German. Thanks to Google Translate, I managed to follow the class and came away inspired to create my Tide Path shawl. In this conversation, we explore the relationship between creativity and practicality. Melanie talks about knowing when a design has become too complicated, the difference between designing and writing a usa...