Iris Blackwood

My grandmother taught me to knit when I was eight, in a front room that always smelled of toast and Imperial Leather soap. I made one very long, very wonky scarf — mostly garter stitch, in an alarming shade of mustard — and then I didn't touch a needle for thirty years.

I came back to knitting at fifty-one, after a difficult winter, because my hands needed something to do in the evenings. The knit stitch came back within an hour. Purl took me a week. Jumpers came a year later. I'm currently four projects into a Mary Jane Mucklestone colourwork phase and I'm not sorry.

I write the knitting guides on Hobbify. Mostly I try to remember what it felt like to sit on my grandmother's sofa trying to work out which needle the yarn was meant to go around. That's the reader I'm writing for.