Cast On

Everyone has worn something that felt like them. In this episode, that feeling starts with a teenage pantsuit made by Brenda’s mother, and widens into the question Claire McCardell asked in What Shall I Wear? : what happens when a woman dresses from self-knowledge instead of trend? The pantsuit is not nostalgia. It is the first proof that clothes can give you yourself back, when someone made them...

The mirror didn’t care what I thought should be there. Steroids, weight, a body that changed without permission — none of that was the real difficulty. The difficulty was the gap: the distance between what the mirror showed and what I expected to see by now. That gap is where getting dressed stops being getting dressed and starts being negotiation. Lakyn Carlton calls it expertise — knowing to the...

Stash Acquired Beyond Life Expectancy. It’s a joke until you do the maths. Eight complete sweaters-worths of yarn in DK and fingering weight alone, not counting the oddballs, the luxury fibre, or the container of 2-ply jumper weight — one 25g ball of every single colour Jamieson & Smith make. (Shut up. That was for research.) The stash stopped being weight when it got a job. Three questions — what...

The quest for trousers that actually fit involved eBay-stalking vintage pattern drafting books - Flat Pattern Cutting and Modelling for Fashion (Helen Stanley, 1972), Pattern Drafting and Dressmaking (Dorothy Moore, 1971), Dress Pattern Designing (Natalie Bray, 1961) - a Craftsy class, and sixty hours of work that produced a toile so catastrophically wrong I couldn’t bend my knees to climb the sta...

Vinted used to feel like the internet version of a Naked Lady party: somebody else’s wrong thing becoming exactly what you needed, for a fiver and postage. Then the pro sellers arrived, the charity-shop stock moved online, and resale started to look less like an exit from fast fashion than another room inside it. A 2025 Yale study found the catch: people who buy second hand frequently also buy mor...

Ghost in the Orchard . Four inches from done. I’d stare at the cable chart and the tiny squares would dance. Close my eyes. Open them. Over and over. The hands that made those cables could not remember how cables worked. Endel Tulving ‘s encoding specificity principle . Godden and Baddeley’s divers learning words underwater. Jonathan Spence ‘s memory palace. And 60% of the total surface of our bra...

Tears in the kitchen. Three bananas on the counter and a recipe I know by heart but cannot, for the life of me, turn into a sequence of actions. Seven ingredients. Too many decisions. My brain could not do seven. So I broke it down. Dry ingredients in one bowl. Wet in the other. Three and four. Manageable. The bread was good. I ate it in bed and felt unreasonably proud of myself. The locus coerule...

An Eye for an Eye - would the animals we eat, eat us? Impossible Hats. Box Hill Picnic, from Jane Austen’s Emma . Dangerous Questions, where the danger is yours, not your opponent’s. This is what insomniacs get up to at 3am while you are sleeping. Kent Berridge coined the term incentive salience . When dopamine runs hot, everything arrives pre-lit with significance. The creativity wasn’t a symptom...

From the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows , Nighthawk n. a recurring thought that only strikes you late at night. Mine struck every night for eight weeks. Zopiclone is a sledgehammer. Daridorexant is a key. One imposes sleep. The other removes the obstacle to it. There’s a big difference, and finding it changed everything. Also: Jasper as Big Spoon. An AI health czar who suggested I should just pour...

Trimethoprim for a UTI. Seven days. By day three, everything was hysterically funny. By day five, I could hear things that weren’t there. By week two, I couldn’t track yarn overs in garter stitch. Garter stitch. The projects on my needles when my brain broke Bradford Road , Dark Days , Ghost in the Orchard were beyond me for the next four months. The only thing that still worked was drop spindling...

Zabava Shorties disasters. The signs were there. Sometimes, you need to break up with a sock pattern. “It’s not you , it’s me. I don’t like you anymore.” Meanwhile, the Peppermint Pocket Skirt delivers enormous pockets perfect for sock projects, and Ruth Collins’ Top Down Centre Out method might revolutionize trouser fitting. The Bradford Road wrap progresses through garter rectangles. Big Love Ca...

It's been a week of finishes and new beginnings. Off the needles, I've completed a Malabrigo hat and love the color pooling. You don’t hear me say that very often. I've finally finished my Amande socks —though I must say I rather hated working both the nupps and wrapped stitches techniques. Sometimes you have to try things to understand what you decidedly do not enjoy. My new obsession is Big Love...

Finishing socks, saving the yarn, new projects from old, planning the perfect colourwork sweater, plus a bit of theoretical physics to prove what knitters already know: knitting is magic. Links and references: * Admiral Hanf yarn by Schoppel Wolle * Lang Jawoll sock yarn * Chessmaster, by Christian Mattausch * Amande, by Josephine and the Seeds * Sophie Shawl by PetiteKnit * Bradford Road Wrap, by...

We travel from Iron Age fire-pits to mid-century homemaking manuals, consider the joys of stash organisation, and muse on the performative aspects of home decorating. There’s a deep dive into the ancient tradition of human-centred design through textiles, from spindle whorls to soft furnishings, a detour through the joys of vacuum bags and organza, a nod to Swedish Death Cleaning, and a look insid...

Replenishing the sock drawer with Priory Socks ( project page ). My Secret Circles , below. Porthos ( project page ), below. I moved my decreases to the back of the heel, and the result is similar to Basic Biarritz and the Kite Heel , yet is uniquely mine and oh, is it ever sexy. The joy of a well-fitting heel cannot be overstated. The short row method used in Zabava Shorties is still, hands down,...

In which an American Thanksgiving is celebrated in the UK, albeit a day late and a pumpkin pie short. One of the first pieces of writing I recorded for Cast On in 2005, this has become one of my most popular podcasts. This particular version was rerecorded in 2011 for A Knitter’s Manifesto , and features sound design by artist, Felicity Ford . This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss...

It’s autumn. Time for finishing projects, knitting socks and celebrating the impending winter by taking the sweaters out of storage. This one is all knitting, and I make no apologies. I'm channelling my grief in the time-honoured tradition: by knitting all the things. I am filling the sock drawer starting with a riff on Winter's Gift , by Amy Snell, using Autumn Leaves and Tarmac colours and a tra...

Off the needles and on; Tour de Fleece wrap up; notes from the production line; a new bag; a new spindle; good materials; and Bennet’s Boiled Potatoes. Compared to some, mine was a paltry Tour de fleece output, still... I made time for fibre, and it did kickstart my spinning, which had been dormant since the move. I talked about Fellview Fibre rolags and my new spalted Beech drop spindle from Rave...

Knitting the slowest sock in the history of sock knitting. Tour de Fleece. The merits of taking small steps vaguely in the direction a goal. I’m thinking about style again, and looking for systems. David Kibbe’s Metamorphosis: Discover Your Image Identity and Dazzle as Only You Can is one of the worst titles ever. And, yes, the price of this book is insane . Fortunately, there’s not long to wait u...

House projects have broken me; the summer of socks continues; the red that bled; Tour de Fleece; and a return to Clifford Byway.  My new obsession for shorties led me to Zabava Socks . They fit very well, and work up quickly. The pattern is easy to follow and the results are moreish. The Tour de Fleece Facebook Group is here . The Holy Texts of Tour de Fleece : Fleece and Fibre Sourcebook , by Deb...

The weather. Men in shorts. The run down. Ta Da moments. And the moments just before a plan comes together. The Red Edge is complete! The chart for Red Edge was designed by Anna-Lisa Mannheimer Lunndown , and is from the book Poems of Colour , by Wendy Keele. I used the top down set-in sleeve method pioneered by Elizabeth Doherty . I talked about this method at length in 153 I, Curator . My Summer...

In this episode: The party dress; picking up threads; a project round up; and the big idea, spoken aloud. The High School Art Teacher Dress by Vogue [(V1410)]( https://simplicity.com/vogue-patterns/v1410 ) I can highly recommend the following books by David Page Coffin: [Making Trousers for Men and Women]( https://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Trousers-Men-Women-Multimedia/dp/1589234499/ref=sr_1_1?crid=...

In this episode: Stash enhancement; hat boxes of joy; the rug of sorrow; knitting memory lane, letting it go. Repeat after me: It is okay to rest. Thank you, past Brenda, for setting up [Esther]( https://www.ravelry.com/projects/Brenda/esther-2 ) (by Camilla Vad) and [Boreal]( https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/boreal-2 ) (by Kate Davies). Leftovers from Esther will become [Winter's Fern]( h...

In this episode: Undone by Cosmo/Cosmo undone; colour blocking that didn’t stitck; a summer romance; a bounty of beautiful sock yarn; packing projects for a journey with no end date; and the view from the Stone Cottage! The sweater that was [Cosmo]( https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/cosmo-cardigan ) is no longer pining for the fjords. We are both happier for it. The colour blocking that I t...

In this episode: I have more projects on the needles at one time than ever before, and I talk about all of them. Also, we're buying a cottage, and trying very hard to remain detached until the contracts have been signed. The Schneke Shawl spiral has been a little bit addictive. Now that I've reached the back and forth section of the first rectangular end, it's less so. Not feeling the love for 24...