STITCH
London
20 kooky ways to knit the city and more
Lauren O’Farrell
Contents
All Aboard: Exploring Stitch London
Pint-sized Parliament Telephone Box
The Queen
The Queen’s Guard
The Police
Tubeline Scarf
Commuter Book Cosy
Bag Bovver
Laptop Sock
Mug Huggers
Cooey the Pigeon
Grog the Raven
Toerag the Tube Mouse
Fleabag the Fox
Parklife Plarn Picnic Blanket
Plastic Bag Bugs
Umbrella Fellas
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