London is a squee knitting book. The patterns aren’t fancy-schmancy, and they don’t require you to be a sage of stitching. All you need is basic knitting knowledge, a willingness to switch on the part of your brain that has crazed ideas and let it run things for a while, and a total lack of yarn snobbery. Things might get fiddly, they might get funny, but I promise there will be squee.
THE CASTING ON OF DEADLY KNITSHADE
My Deadly Knitshade side, the part of me that appears like Dr Jekyll’s Mr Hyde to knit up a storm when least expected, arrived when my first fledging stitches were cast on as a bit of a grrrr in the face of fate. I was six months into treatment for a rather pesky strain of cancer. Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a hungry type of blood cancer, had decided to take up residence in several bits of me and blow raspberries at medical attempts to evict it. Knitting was part of my attempt to wrestle myself back from the big C and get on with something slightly less scary.
Stitch London, the small group of stitchers I’d helped to create, arrived to sit and knit with me week after week. Those people, the stitching, and the worryingly large amount of cake we consumed, were a yarn-based distraction from other kinds of needles. I returned to Stitch London week after week, blood-test-bruised, occasionally bald, and bloody thrilled to be there.
I knitted (quite badly) in waiting rooms, on day wards while being filled with chemo (after ensuring my drip was placed so I could still stitch), in uncomfy hospital beds, at home after innard-crisping blasts of radiation, and eventually in yawnsome isolation after high-dose chemo and a bone marrow transplant that caused me to have to regrow my immune system from scratch. I may not have had any bone marrow, but I had two needles, some rather nice handpainted yarn and paltry, but oddly soothing, knitting skills.
Three years later, the evil cancer was vanquished, and it was quite clear that knitting (several nasty sets of chemo, stem-cell therapy, and numerous blasts of radiation aside) had totally cured me. It was a yarn-wrapped miracle. Woo hoo! Deadly Knitshade lived, she was much better at knitting, and she was consumed by the worrying ambition to conquer the world with her sticks and string.
Things were going to get woolly …
STITCH LONDON LIVES!
Stitch London (Stitch and Bitch London back then) hatched from a three-person egg of a knitting group (dreamt up by myself, Laura ‘Purl Princess’ Parkinson and Georgia ‘Astrogirl’ Reid, with the help of Debbie Stoller’s Stitch ’n Bitch call to needles). We started off learning together. We loved it. We tempted others in.
Laura and Georgia moved on, but Stitch London had its claws in me. Escape was impossible. I now wrangle a roaring, city-stomping woolly Godzilla of thousands of stitchers. The group has taught hundreds of new knitters for free, and done marvellously mad knitting things. All because of one simple idea: knitting rules.
Knitting is addictive. After your first hit of knitting, you crave more. It’s the kind of addiction you want other people to share, because you love it so all-consumingly. So much so that if knitting were a person, you’d have tattooed its name somewhere unmentionable, killed off all its exes and asked it to marry you by now. Knitting is the chocolate cake, the Johnny Depp, and the feel-good summer blockbuster of craft.
Teaching new knitters often makes me feel like a dodgy drug dealer lurking on a shadowy corner with yarn and needles. A fledgling Stitch Londoner arrives at a meeting with a shiny new pair of sticks, some untouched yarn and that wide-eyed baby-deer-in-the-headlights look. By the end of the evening, they’re twitching with yarn greed; visions of smooshy socks and splendiferous shawls dancing behind their eyes.
This book encourages that ‘you can cast on, but you’ll never cast off’ tradition. Here be patterns anyone can knit to drag you into the depths of knitting from which you will never escape. MWA HA HAAAA!
THE SCARY WORLD OF PATTERN MUTATIONS
Those two needles in your hands (or four needles if you’re a DPN-er) are your electricity-conducting attachments. That humble ball of yarn is the lifeless body of your monster. You, the simple knitter, are Dr Frankenstitch, and it is up to you to bring every pattern to life.
There are people who won’t bungee jump in case they end up as a puddle of jam on the pavement. There are people who won’t try Stilton because it smells like feet. And, sadly, there are people who won’t step off the beaten track of a pattern and make it their own. To those people, I make chicken noises and shake my head despairingly.
A knitting pattern is a mere suggestion of what you’ll end up with. In this book, I encourage you to totally mess with my patterns. Grab them by the stitches, twist them, shake them, turn them purple, love them, hug them and call them George. When you cast on your knitting, it is just that – your knitting. Throw in a few stitches here, a new colour there, extra arms, a section of unexpected rib, a set of teeth, marmalade, a bit of fairisle or, gasp, a row or two of ugly eyelash yarn. Mix buttons, pipe cleaners, watch cogs, cat hair, glitter glue, beads, and all manner of crafty bits together with your knitting and see how they get on. They might have beautiful babies, or you might produce something that you later have to drag down to the Thames and drown. It might be traumatic, but at least you can say that you and your knitting lived.
All Aboard: Exploring Stitch London
Stitch London can be explored any way you choose. Stroll firmly through from start to finish like an industrious City worker; buzz about alighting on patterns you take a fancy to in the style of a Hyde Park bumble bee, or stumble from section to section in a random order like an after-hours West End night clubber searching for that elusive night bus home.
This section is a friendly helping hand to help you navigate your way along the pavements of Stitch London patterns, so you can knit without any niggles. The rest is up to you and your trusty needles. Happy travels, and mind the gap.
DIFFICULTY RATINGS
To help you find your way through the patterns in Stitch London, we’ve rated the projects with difficulty levels – with a little London twist.
There are similarities between how you get around London and how you get around a knitting pattern. You’re either a new knitter, fresh off the plane, all wide-eyed and a little lost; a clued-up knitter, strutting the streets with the confidence of an Oyster card-carrying, umbrella-wielding local; or a stitch sage, roaring down back roads and nipping up side streets like a home-grown London cabbie.
Tourist – Patterns for newbie knitters who stick to the tube map and don’t wander into unknown territory.
London Local – For knitters who know their way around a stitch, but sometimes need to check their A–Z.
Black Cab Driver – Projects for dyed-in-the-wool knitters with ‘The Knowledge’ of all things knitty in the city.
GUBBINS
‘Gubbins’ means stuff and things. In this book, it means the materials that you’ll need to make each project: yarn, needles and all the other bits.
ALL CHANGE
These
