Payday yarn When I was a little girl, payday meant one thing to me: the yarn shop. Once my mother got paid, we walked to the local yarn shop in Pretoria North and bought yarn for whatever was going onto our hooks or needles next. Not yarn for one day. …

The Sedge Stitch Blanket
Every time a new grandchild is announced in our family, I do the same thing. I get yarn and a hook, and I start a blanket.

The Person Who Made It Should Wear It
I am waiting for yarn.
Summer tops are coming. I have the designs in my head, and when the yarn arrives I will make them, and then I will have to photograph them. On my body. The body I made them for, because I made them for me, not for a size chart.
That thought makes me cringe. And I have been sitting with that reaction long enough to want to write about it.

Bekendstelling: Marishia Baard van Woestyn-Kind
Om ‘n nuwe jaarn handelsmerk in Suid Afrika te vestig is nie maklik nie. Daar is baie stemme, baie gevestigde name, en as jy nuut is, verdwyn jy maklik tussen al die geraas. Daarom wil ek julle voorstel aan Marishia Baard van Woestynkind.

I Think I Am Coming Back
Last Thursday I facilitated a workshop for the first time in years. It was three hours. Laid back. Easy. Only about two hours of actual content, and then time for questions at the end. Nothing like the full-day workshops I used to run. And yet, driving away afterward, something had …

Designs by a Human, Tested by Humans
I want to write about something that has been sitting heavily with me, and I am going to do it with the full awareness that I use AI in my job as a Power Platform developer, and to keep up with the social media side of Ilona Slow Life Creations. …

The Table That Stayed Behind
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 …

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 …

