Last night I started joining the squares of the Namaqua Blanket. Forty-eight small blocks in six colours, eight blocks per colour. Four with green centres and four with soft yellow centres within each colour group. Thirteen large blocks, two per colour, with one colour getting a third. Half with green …
2026
Showing: 1 - 10 of 17 Articles
Namaqua: ‘Make a Big Blanket’
On the tenth of August I was sitting outside our tent, knitting. That is not a remarkable sentence in my life. It is most of my life. The birds were busy with whatever birds are busy with in the early part of the day, and I was as peaceful as …
The Learner Has Passed the Master
Someone asked me recently why I do not design intricate knitting patterns. It is a fair question. My crochet designs have complexity — construction that takes thought, stitch patterns that require attention, garments that demand something from the maker. But my knitting patterns are what I call Measure and Make. …
Forgive and Forget — The Lie We Were Told
The previous post opened something I was not entirely expecting. Messages arrived. Privately, carefully, from people carrying things they had not said out loud in a very long time. The same struggles. The same weight. And threaded through many of them — the same question about forgiving other people that …
One Strand at a Time
I realised something this morning. I am not sure when it changed. I am not sure how. But somewhere in my fifties, quietly and without announcement, something shifted — and I only noticed it today, sitting alone with my knitting and the sounds of whatever is happening outside. Let me …
Knitting Through the Madness — A Menopausal Confession
Let me tell you about yesterday. We went to town for groceries. Simple enough. Two shops in, my husband quietly handed me the car keys and suggested, with the patience of a man who has clearly been paying attention, that he would get the last few things. He would meet …
Scrappy — A Broom for my Brain
There are projects you plan carefully. You choose the yarn, the pattern, the colourway. You swatch. You consider. You cast on with intention. And then there is Scrappy. The Problem With Merino For years I have wanted to crochet a genuine wool blanket for my bed. Not an acrylic blanket. …
A new series on Patreon – Fibre Facts
For years, this chapter lived inside an 8-hour workshop — slides projected on a wall somewhere between Cape Town and Windhoek, a room full of hooks and needles, and me trying to explain, in the time I had, why the yarn in someone’s hands mattered as much as the pattern …
A story about a bohippie jacket
There are things you do not warn people about before they marry a yarn snob.
Performing a burn test on a jacket purchased at an indoor market in Mossel Bay on a Saturday afternoon is apparently one of them. My husband took it in his stride. He is used to me by now.
The Sophie Hood Saga – Part 3
In which everything unravels, and then everything is fine. If you have been following this story, you will know that it began in New Zealand with two skeins of lime green MYak, escalated through two additional yarn purchases, and resulted in what I have been calling the most expensive Sophie …