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Welcome to Stitch London

Stitch London isn’t about being a master knitter with so much knitting knowledge rammed into your head that your eyes might pop out to reveal a perfectly stitched merino brain. It isn’t about having yarn so fancy that you have to get your butler to knit it for you, or needles so shiny that they attract ravenous moths if you knit outdoors in summer. It’s about loving to knit so much that you feel you may implode; putting your stitching stamp on everything in sight whether people like it or not (remember – you have pointy sticks if they don’t), and surviving as a knitter in one of the world’s most tangled and terrific cities.

Welcome to Stitch London.

London: city of puddled pavements, story-soaked streets, manky pigeons, sharp-elbowed commuters, jam-packed double-decker buses, shouty market sellers, bustling black cabs, vinegar-smelling chip shops, pubs packed with pint sippers, herds of camera-clicking tourists, and endless rivers of steaming hot tea.

Also a city of stitch-savvy knitters.

London knitters are everywhere. From the swish South Bank of the River Thames to the teetering tops of Tower Bridge, you are probably never more than ten metres away from a London knitter at any time. We have sticks, we have string and – little do non-knitters know – we are taking over the city.

In the midst of pointy spires, shiny skyscrapers, sloshy riversides and scurrying stitchers, Stitch London was born of the fact that I can’t help but see London knitwise. And I’d like everyone else to see London knitwise, too.

THE SQUEE AND THE SWOON

Knitting should make you do one of two things: squee or swoon.

Swoony knits consist of floaty numbers made from wool sheared from sheep found only above the cloudline in deepest Peru’s mystic mountains, where they’re fed on mystic mountains, where they’re fed on silken grasses and drink only dew squeezed from the hair of beautiful maidens. They involve fancy stitches and complicated cast-ons. When you knit them, you need to be in a room with walls so thick that no sound can penetrate lest you lose your place in the pattern. When you hold up a finished swoony knit, people will go ‘ahhhhhhh!’ or ‘ooooooo!’. They may pass out in the glorious radiance of your knit.

Squee knits are quite the opposite. They’re sometimes made from cheap, squishy yarn in a garish shade you can’t help loving. They’re sometimes made of random leftover yarns, or yarn that is quite unsettling to buy, let alone knit with – eye-gouging colours, weird bobbly bits, and textures that remind you of getting your teeth drilled. The stitches are simple but cleverly placed. When you knit them, people will ask you what on earth you’re knitting; when you tell them, you’ll get funny looks. When you brandish a finished squee knit, people will go ‘squeeeeeee!’; they will beam manically and may try to steal it. Don’t let them! It’s yours and they can’t have it.

Stitch 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.