If I’m sitting, I’m knitting…
Winner of the Kirstie’s Handmade Christmas 2021 Christmas Jumper Competition.

My ethos began simply: if I couldn’t find it to buy, I wanted to learn to make it. And increasingly, I found bought knitwear to be uninspiring, cheaply made, it left me a bit cold.

Many many moons ago, my tiny, fierce grandmother taught me to knit. She took me to her local wool shop and had me pick out a simple pattern. Then I chose the wool (an impossible blue fluffy number) and, before handing over the cash, she made me absolutely promise that I would see it through to the end.

A long while later, my parents moved from the house they had lived in for decades, and there, buried deep in the recesses of their attic, was the front of the jumper and the rest of the wool.

Sorry, Grandma!

But that wasn’t the end of the story. The birth of my youngest son Teddy, 11 years ago, somehow sparked a revival and a passion for creating things with wool. I ran with it and haven’t looked back. I find knitting one of the most meditative, mindful pastimes and it has stood me in good stead, through the autism diagnosis of my youngest, and the many other hurdles life has inevitably launched our way.

This has relatively recently coincided with a vow I made to not buy any new clothes for a year. I think that must have been about 3 years ago now, and it has trickled down to my whole family, whose first port of call will be a charity shop or eBay.

I am inspired to create pieces that are manageable, knitwear that you can look at and think: I know those stitches, I think I can do that! I try to make my designs as achievable and accessible as I can. I love colour, and enjoy throwing things together to see how they’ll come out. I’ve discovered, actually, that I’m quite good at it, though I’m still baffled as to how it works.

A few years back, I designed a jumper for our little Jack Russell, Juno. She is a bit of a princess, frankly, and feels the cold to the extent that just opening the front door in winter sees her scurrying behind the sofa.

In early August of this year, the maddest thing in the world happened. Tom Daley was pictured knitting that very pattern at the Olympics in Tokyo and tagged me on his Instagram account. And my world went a little bit crazy.

I had had a minor brush with fame before, when I designed and knitted some little dog jumpers for Simon Cowell’s dogs for a Christmas TV show – Text Santa – but my name hadn’t even been mentioned on that occasion, so it was only my nearest and dearest who had the faintest inkling.

In the midst of the Tom Daley excitement, at the start of August of 2021, I moved from the rural North-East, close to Durham, where I had lived for the best part of a decade, to the furthest point East in England – Lowestoft. I live on the beach, which feeds my soul, with my five fabulous boys, in various stages of leaving home, my lovely husband, and our two dogs, nutjobs both.

If you’ve read this far, I commend you! Now, off you go and get knitting, and if you fancy it, have a look through my patterns. If you have any questions, fire away <3

Disclosure: Please note that I will provide links in my posts and patterns that I think you might find useful. Some but by no means all of those links will be affiliate links, which means if you click them to make a purchase I will earn a small commission. Please, however, understand that I link these companies and their products because of my experience of using them, and their quality, and the commission I receive from your purchases is a happy by-product of that experience.