So for years I kept mum about my passion for needle arts.
Guys, there's only one thing I hate more than bloggers who start sentences with 'guys' - and it's those mealy-mouth hipsters who crochet codpieces and their ye-olde-sideburned friends who pickle stuff and slaughter their own gluten-free goats.
I am not someone who has hobbies. I have tried knitting, and I can't figure it out.
I love shawls!
As a kid, I always used to make clothes. My grandmother made everything with me - she taught me how to knit.
I have worked with wool all my life as a designer. There's so much more to it than knitwear - it's an amazingly versatile material and can be used in so many different ways from chic to rustic.
For a few years, skeins of yarn piled up in baskets around the house. There weren't enough humans in my mother's orbit to wear all the scarves and sweaters and hats she knitted. And then, as suddenly as she started, she lost interest, leaving needles still entwined in half-finished fragments.
My mother knitted a lot, but I never did; it was no fun.
I've always been creative - I baked, knitted and crocheted with my mum and grandma.
I'm a yarnaholic. That means I have more yarn stashed away than any one person could possibly use in three or four lifetimes. There's something inspiring about yarn that makes me feel I could never have enough.
I became the world's queen of sweaters without even knowing how one was made.
I have knitted before, but I gave that up.
My own hobbies are rather quiet. I like to read and do needlework, and I love animals.
I can knit quite well. I make really long scarves.
Some of the mail I've had has been weird. When I played Guy of Gisborne, a woman crocheted a mini-version of me.
Yarn, patterns, and needle sizes have come such a long way since your grandmother's afghans. Creatively, there is just so much to get into, so much to play with. It's an amazing way to turn inward and get off your phone.
We used to make patterns in the dirt, hanging our feet off the horse-drawn farm equipment. We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within forms in my crocheted wire sculptures.
I know how to sew, knit, I'm a great chef, and a good dancer.
When people see me knitting, I tell them I'm a knitter. Not the sort of knitter they may have run into before, but a passionate, constant, deliberate knitter. I knit everyday, all the time, everywhere I go.
