I wrote this essay to read at the launch of my new pamphlet (!!! my first ever physically published writing, for sale on my website!!!) at Burning House Books last month. I loved performing it to a packed little room full of some of my nearest and dearest but wanted to share it a little further afield! If u like what u see maybe commission me to write something for you?

We walk past a leaflet, glossy and right at our feet. I turn around and pull my kid back reluctantly for a few steps to get a photo because it says ‘God is 100% in love with you!’ and I don’t feel like people will believe this one. The text is red, and the background is taken up by a non-anatomical heart rendered in pink watercolour. I am wondering if anyone else saw this or is it just me? How long does it take for religious delusions to fade? ^‘Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own…’ I never got it when people had that sexual overtone to their worship, I laughed quietly at the praise songs when they forgot themselves and went all Margery Kempe:

‘Come like a rushing wind

Come light the fire again

Come like a burning flame

Have your way

Have your way’

This is a real song. No, for real! I’m not misremembering. And maybe if god is 100% into me it’s actually not funny at all but really serious and sexy and I should’ve been singing it back then with a sort of pouty affect and turning around trying to see which angle god was looking at me from so I could give him a real show. Although, I guess he’s omnipotent so it’s kind of irrelevant, and I’m not usually into men anyway. But it must be a pretty heady feeling to be chosen personally. Maybe right now I should be wearing better underwear? Just in case…

When I was little I really thought my body was a temple. If you’re looking for specifics, I had this image of the US Treasury building, the one that’s printed on the back of most American ten dollar notes- it has a bunch of romanesque columns that give it a sort of BC energy.

The structure was ochre, in my head, for a vaguely ancient feel. It was anchored somewhere around my chest- always ready and waiting for God to come and share me at any time he wanted. I don’t think I thought that the Holy Spirit lived inside me at all times, but I really thought that it could happen at any time. I think I have assumed for ages that this was a more universal Christian experience but maybe the idea of God taking up residence inside your physical form is a little more fringe. I never felt like having a body was something that could be done in isolation.

For some reason in primary school they really push this idea that your body is 75% water. I looked it up the other day and it’s not really true, maybe at some points in your life, but mostly a person’s water content wavers around the 60% mark. I think of my body like american bread, you could crush a whole loaf in your fist. So much space for sharing. In her book Lovebug, Daisy Lafarge writes:

‘Since Humans contain less than 50 per cent animal cells, biologist Lynn Margulis has suggested we are more accurately ‘holobiont’, an assemblage of host organism and its microbial, bacterial and viral partners. Stefan Helmreich similarly proposes replacing Homo sapiens with Homo microbis.’

I have this little panic because I’m doing the maths now and it’s looking like I’m what? 110% water and bacteria? What about the fact that I have my mum’s tissue in my body, or tissue from my kid living in my brain? In her book, Matrescence, Lucy Jones calls these ‘zombie cells’. What percentage zombie is my youngest brother? Tissue from all four of us older siblings is crammed into his body alongside our mum’s. I think the statistical mismatch is definitely a matter of my over simplistic reading but isn’t all of this? I like to misunderstand, it feels flirty. Lucy Jones says humans have one of the longest periods of chimerism after pregnancy. I knew it, having a body isn’t something that can be done in isolation.

This guy Bob Hickman has become a bit of an internet phenomenon. He’s a new take on an old classic; an old fashioned heretic. Picture this, a man stands half naked in his dirty basement room, skin pale and beaming, legs bare except for dirty knee pads (has he been kneeling?) The hem of his work polo shirt just covers the smooth curve of his bare white ass. He isn’t posed as though he is being crucified, but for some reason that’s what it feels like. His palms are raised and flat, facing away from his face. He is standing at a ninety degree angle from the camera and turns his head towards the viewer, stringy hair cut into a stiff monk’s bob. The setting has the ominous tone of a televised ransom note, or a snuff film. It’s charged and a little erotic in its discomfort. His feed is full of random nudes.

‘Greetings everybody! God entered into my body as a body my same size!’ His voice has this influencer tone to it and he tells us about his life, arching his feet up to balance precariously on his toes. The thing is you can’t see how it started, he posts so frequently, and there are so many accounts claiming to be him, or are they alts? Does the world’s most holy spirit filled man have a finsta? My sister says she knew about him before he was big and it really scared her. My friends from where I was born say they see his car around Indianapolis all the time. The car is what really gets me though, he paints words on it. I wonder if he got a leaflet too.

The thing is with this online stuff, it’s impossible to know what is real. Everyone in the comments is worried about him, he’s posting fucked up videos of his girlfriend, AI videos of his girlfriend, sometimes he calls her god’s girlfriend. He’s half nude all the time, top or bottom. I look on google for images of his car and there are a few different cars, maybe some are fake. I start writing down all the stuff that’s painted on the windows and I feel moved by it like poetry

God entered my body as a body my same size

God rips my face

Mouth, nek, does

Voices of devil

Shoots in mouth-

Gum disease.

Attaks in dreams

Appears, laughs and

Teases

God rips my mouth

Corners. Jesus

Said I want spit

Runout of mouth

I see 1000s of

Visions a day,

Real sik, with

God in me

God heats my body

Up like on fire

Shoots in - rips my

Face, laughs in visions

Immanuel

God with us

I’ve been thinking a lot about how in my church they would have said straight faced and solemnly that he was possessed by a demon. It could all be real. What scares me is the pure not knowing. What delights me is the pure not knowing. I don’t know what I’d do if God really did choose me like this, if I found out I’d been totally wrong about leaving the faith, if I had no control and god shared my skin like a sleeping bag on a cold night.

God is 100% in love with you!

Robert Gluck gets horny thinking about god’s angels wanting to have sex with him and pauses in the middle of writing ‘Bob’s Fundamentalist Movement’ to jerk off. The essay concludes with this thought:

‘The Bible shows us that the whole fucked-up warring world would be a lot better off if everyone just marched into my butthole.’

I’ve never actually read about Margery Kempe except through Gluck’s interpretation, and I think it’s really a story about him and about how God can be like a really sexy person you are hooking up with if you yearn hard enough. I can relate. We used to get warned that anything could become an idol if you got too into it. All it takes for me to turn full heretic idolator is to be in love with someone who is just a little less in love with me. Picture this, I’m in bed with someone who has to go to work. I put my hands together like a prayer and say ‘Open up, I’m diving in!’ pointing my fingers at their naked ass. I want to be god too, live in that little space between the skin and organs like a rat in the walls. A cosy thought, but they are already under my skin.

‘…offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God…’

I guess god, if you really are 100% in love with me, what I want you to know is that I’m switchy. I don’t mind who gets inside who, as long as someone’s getting filled up.

Clamber Cardigan on Ravelry

Clamber Cardigan on my website

Inspired by my fantasies of finding the perfect cardigan in a vintage shop, Clamber features a gently puffed sleeve shape, a statement collar and a front panel of embroidered pansies. (Do you all have these dreams by the way? The ones where you’ve found the world’s best secondhand shop that’s stocked with stuff that’s exactly your perfect vibe? They’re so great right?)

I always find that I’m missing a versatile, lightweight layer to wear over things without adding too much warmth. This cardigan is great because it’s not too heavy; has space in the sleeves for something underneath; and the slight negative ease at the bottom gives the hips a lovely shape when closed or gently pulls to the side when open to show off whatever cute thing you’re wearing underneath! If you’re not feeling the colourwork, you can always make it plain - or add your own like some of the testers have done!

This pattern was quite a labour of love, I was making it and remaking it for most of 2025 to get it right! I knitted my first sample (RIP) on this epic research trip that Becca and I did to the South East of England to see the famous Charleston House. We stayed in Rye and as well as Charleston, we visited Rye, Margate’s Shell Grotto, Derek Jarman’s Garden, the Marc Chagall stained glass windows, and loads of beaches! It was an incredible dive into queer histories and homes and was so rich with flowers, patterns, and colours. Really it was a massively decorative trip which I’m sure is in large part why I ended up designing something so pretty (it’s not usually like me to do flowers!)

The movies we watched while we were away - The Duke of Burgundy and Calamity Jane - have heavy vintage cardigan vibes and lesbian themes/overtones that inspired me as well. Don’t you think the Clamber Cardigan would be the perfect garment for sexual tension at a wildlife lecture or keeping a pretty butch warm on a hike through the Black Hills of Dakota? I chose pansies in part because I wanted to nod to the queer symbolism and importance that certain flowers have (although of course the Clamber Cardigan is for all orientations and genders!)

The testing process for this jumper was a little bit harder than usual, I left extra time to account for the fact that it went over the holiday season, but I think in future I won’t run another test over christmas as most everyone felt a little rushed! Despite that, I think the testers, as always, really pulled through and made some really gorgeous projects. I love that the people who test my patterns for me always put their own stamp on things- we have some unique embroideries, knitted buttons, and cropped versions on top of a gorgeous selection of colourways!

The fit for this one was a little bit off at the bottom, as I said before the negative ease is a design feature- but it was a little bit much during the test. Based on feedback, we have since added a few inches to the high hip and redistributed the increases to give a little more space through the body. This keeps the style as intended while making it a little more comfortable to wear.

Maria and I worked on the pattern, Becca provided moral and practical support, and! ROSE IS BACK!! Since October 2025 the WLM team is now 4 PEOPLE. We have a few patterns in development and we’ve already dreamed up most of our schedule for 2026 (as well as the broad strokes of a secret project!) Here are Maria, Rose and Becca at the WLM Christmas Dinner. What a gorgeous wee crew!

Love
From
Lydia

An electronic jolt wakes you. You rise, stiff from the table, hands outstretched you are holding your computer/phone/ipad - and on it? A web page is open on the listing for the pattern of your dreams- The Tether Top Trio!

That’s right! It’s (a)live!

After soooo many months percolating in process, sooo many samples, sooo many rethinks, you can finally purchase the pattern that you will make and remake and make again til you put me out of business (you’ll never need another top pattern, what have I done?? I’ve created a monster!)

Okay so the metaphors are mixed at best and sort of never worked from the start but I’m feeling silly and excited!!! Can you believe there’s finally a new pattern after like ten months?! I almost can’t.

Since my first sample, this has been my most worn pattern to date, I find it so comfortable and inspiring and I keep having new ideas for it! I’d been wanting something simple with a comfy and slightly sexy fit that can be worked up quite painlessly and be a great base for embroidery, and I think it really worked out!

The test knit was one of the most chill ever with so few issues and so many lovely projects that I can’t wait to share with you on instagram- I feel so happy with how the pattern works for different bodies and I am really excited to see even more people putting their unique mark on it and using up their waste in a creative and exciting way.

I love scrapbusting projects but I feel like the market for mini scrappy multicoloured textural ones is getting a little saturated and I wanted to answer the question ‘yes but what about these bigger lengths I’m left with?’ and come up with something tidy and intentional looking that’s still improvisational.

The top is started bottom-up in the round with optional bust-darts and then worked flat for the front and back before working the (optional) sleeves in the round. There are two collar options, but you can always just work a simple ribbed collar if you want. It’s fingering-weight so the fabric is really comfy, and the length is a hint longer than ones I’ve made in the past- I think you’ll love it but if you need more info please just click through to the ravelry or website listings!

Ravelry Listing Here!

Website listing Here!

Anyway, thanks so much for reading this far, I really hope you’re hyped as I am! If it’s not your vibe, please go have a look at my other patterns, or tell your friends? Or leave a comment or a wee like on here or instagram or ravelry- so many free ways to support a small business! I hope you are having a great day!

Love         
        From                  
                 Lydia 

When I turn thirty, I will have been A Mother for almost exactly two thirds of my ‘adult life’. The future stretches like a long shadow from those four, tiny pre-procreative years, they look smaller with each hour that the sun lowers in the sky and my life as A Mother becomes a great beast that stretches across the pavement at my feet. My kid is in my shade and they are playing a game of never-stand-on-the-sunlight. They show me how to cheat, running down the sidewalk.
’The shadow is always at your shoes, it doesn’t even matter where you stand!’
They spin, arms outstretched, dark spots greet each footfall, they’re right.

I think of my body as a separate force from my mind, my parenthood a second mind and body. The fragmentation takes a toll, and I wonder often how many people I can be at once. I suppose the shadow is always attached to my feet. When I was twenty-one and pregnant, the dog days, dog tired. Sick as a dog, vomiting in my bed, pissing myself, my child biting at me from the inside, dog-eat-dog- I had ceded the physical to them and there was nothing I could do to slow the process. The child creates itself, and keeps creating, with and without the mother.

Now, I work at untangling my body from the space of their need. Breastfeeding becomes distant, intimacy optional. Still, the kid reaffirms their claim on me, they write ‘I heart mum naked’ in the steam on the bathroom mirror with a supreme innocence and I tell them I prefer a little more privacy. Later, other hands run down my chest with the soap and water, a different face at my nipple, I don’t know how to be the same person. Still, my body reaffirms reproduction’s claim on me, blood in the water all marbling at my feet and a red stripe down my leg.

When R was born, the placenta stayed inside me, ragged pieces of their life reclaimed by a doctor, elbow deep in my torso. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry’ she said it again and again like a mantra as I hemmoraged, her hand against my womb. In the car seat, an hour old, it’s one of the first things my child ever saw. New eyes and their mother getting fisted on a hospital bed, that’s life kid! The first photo of us together is of me taking a selfie with them on my couch, legs splashed with blood, blood pooling at my feet, I’m sending it to family in America.

It’s so funny, like ha ha funny, like I read these things I write in a sombre voice and I’m like ha ha what a funny weird insane thing to have happened to me ha ha why didn’t I like my kid? Why did my body get so fucked up ha ha it could only happen to me ha ha my friends dealing with the same shit what are we like? Why was I taking a selfie I could probably have died ha ha ha! In hospital with sepsis, on the floor with the slipped disk, on new brain meds that make the pain worse, on pain meds that make the brain worse my friends and I ha ha ha what a crew.

My kid tells me that I’m a really good mum now, they say ‘you didn’t used to be that good but you’re really good now.’ They lay on my body and they’re so huge, they still want me to put their clothes on for them even though they can do it themselves. I lock myself in the bathroom to send a nude. At some point here I’ll have to find out how to osmose back into myself again. We do origami on the bus and it’s like a show. I can see old folks looking at me like ‘that is a Good Mum’ and I’m like ‘no phone for now little buddy let’s get the paper out wow what a good little heart you made here’s how to make your folds more crisp!’

I’m at a performance with my friends and they are Mothers too, we aren’t even women but the mother thing stuck. The performer gargles into a contact mic, they say they want to steal my baby. The baby transforms into a red ball. We all play with it, the audience, arms outstretched until it rises and doubles in size, triples, exponentially until it is a new planet, they sing ‘don’t ask me to explain myself.’ Afterwards we talk about how much we loved it and also whether or not we are MILFs and if we want to be. L says ‘I don’t like being called a mother but I like being called a MILF’ and I’m like yeah I get that. R is a new planet and I orbit them. I want to be the sun.

My friends take turns letting me stroke their hair, I call people baby in lots of different ways. I think I have been a Mother since my own teen mother screamed with me all day in the postpartum psychosis of our empty house, or since my brother was born, or my sister was born, or my sibling was born. Or maybe since my youngest brother was born and I cut the umbilical cord and maybe I started being a mother when I was fifteen on the phone to a friend changing nappies. Or maybe I only became a mother when I started telling my friends I loved them and kissing their soft heads like they are the most precious things in the world to me. (They are.)

R gets so much more confident each day, they are swimming and sewing and they are still somehow a cat all the time especially when they are anxious. I think they are trying to model their chubby belly after mine, they’re exceptionally proud of it. I’m exceptionally proud of them and I’m like how do they do it and I’m like maybe I am a Good Mum now. I go to the gym and I can feel the tattoos curl and uncurl with the loose skin at my underarm, when they hold my hand it still weighs down my whole body.

What I’m getting at, what I mean is, god what I’m trying to say. It’s something like god, oh no, aw crap, I maybe have to be just one guy after all who’s idea was this anyway? Like I’m writing this stupid essay and I miss my therapy appointment ha ha ha my therapy where I was gonna talk about how insane I feel on the school holidays ha ha just writing an essay about feeling insane about how I feel all the time ha ha, that’s life kid!

I really did miss my therapy appointment to write this! The show I reference was ‘An Evening With’ by Alex Franz Zehetbauer as a part of Buzzcut Festival which still has events running through the month. It was so wonderful, I highly recommend it if you ever get a chance to see it.

Love        
        From
                 Lydia 

My mother’s friends still tower in my mind, despite most of them now being shorter than me, and most of them were, or are, or have been fat. Christian evangelical punks in 1990s Indiana and Ohio were a strange group, I live with the contradictions, and so do they. Women who lived like the husband was the head of the house, homeschool moms, always dieting, always guilty, women who controlled their children. They dressed in black, long skirts in a punk way, long skirts in a modest way, their band tees had holes in them, they didn’t drink. My mum would go to the haberdashery where she worked as a teen and buy metal studs to decorate her hoodies and draw patches in sharpie on scraps of old t-shirts to pin to new ones. They had tattoos on their wide arms, tattoos on their chests, huge with breastfeeding, their hair was dyed in bright colours that flashed into mine when they helped me add streaks of red to my blonde baby hairs.

I loved the first time I had my hair bleached and coloured, my mother’s beautiful cosmetologist friend combing out my hair while I sat in an antique wood chair in the living room of the last house my parents ever owned. I think about her frazzled blonde hair, her lip piercings, her inked skin. Two sections at the front of my head, wrapped in tin foil from the kitchen and fizzing. I don’t even think you’re supposed to bleach kids’ hair that young, it was something I held as a little glimmer of parentally-sanctioned rebellion when I eventually went to mainstream school. The brightness of the red was a revolution and I reinvented myself as one of them, one of these women.

I had to call them all by their last names, an odd formality with these adults who loved me. Mr and Mrs, each came in a pair with a brace of rowdy kids who I still love with my whole heart. Not many of them are pairs anymore, and my generation of their strange little scene is scattered across the USA in a way that means I can never see them all at once again. All of us queer and strange and messed up, but we share an ardent admiration for each other’s fat moms as they live in our memories. I’m curious how fat they really were, it was the ‘90s, the 2000s, the word was so present. Now I think they were probably smaller than I am today, they were younger than me too, younger even than most of my sister’s friends who make me feel old. They started having kids in their late teens, unwittingly ceding their young thin bodies to be reshaped. It was a constant, open battle to regain control - we all knew they were trying not to eat, and that their bodies wouldn’t let them. Unruly.

Refusing the boundaries of our shared high-control environment was impossible for me. A tiny, skinny eldest daughter with energy only to perform to the best of their ability the role of clever, godly child, I was all in. But I think there was something erotic in their bodies, not just in the early budding of my queerness, but in the way they defied control. I know a little of this war now, the aching hunger and the hope of smaller, the break between my self and my physical form, I know how painful it can be. Within that, I see these thick waists and round bellies, cellulite thighs and second chins asserting their right to exist, fighting their way through starvation, holding on to what they need to endure, sensual and expansive to the last. I wonder if it’s the same for the other kids, the fixation on their beauty, early crushes. It’s such a classic to fancy your friends’ mums isn’t it, but it’s the fat women who stayed with me.

There’s something about a fat punk. The dark lips, the cleavage in a faded old navy scoop neck, bottle-black short-fringe hair against a full cheek, hips that move in worn out denim, thick hands with chipped nails. We all knew it was wrong, wrong to look that way. And yet, in the decoration, the ornament - the overwhelming intentional difference that defied their social directive to blend in to the best of their ability - they were adamant in their beauty. Loud and inspired, they created everywhere they went. Behind them all is a trail of paintings, writings, collage, music, magical homes that sung about who they were. They were poor, they were young, they were mothers, they lived as secondary artists to their husbands. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else as funny as my mum’s friends, total weirdos who ruined everything and built everything and messed up and got lost and were so important. I love them.

Now sometimes I look in the mirror and see one of them. It catches me off guard. My ratty blue hair draping over my increasingly tattooed skin, the roundness of my arms, the rolls of fat that rise out against the elastic of my bra, the divets in my shoulders from carrying the weight of my breasts. My hastily applied mum-makeup, red lips, my cropped shirt riding up to show the ripples of my inky, stretch-marked midriff. I never thought I would be fat, I was always small until puberty put the fear of a new god in me. I started curving outwards, only eating strategically, anything but that. When I became a mum it happened all at once, and I lost my reasons for loving my body. But these women had been teaching me this, too, how to love a body like that while they showed me how they hated theirs. I have spent so many years loving for them, running my hands across the ripples on my mother’s belly. I am so skilled at making myself a tool for loving.

Lately I’ve been revelling more in my fatness. The sexuality of inhabiting my fat body comes to me in flashes, glimpses that cut through one thousand layers of crusted shame and trauma built up between my body and I. The heft of me in a hand, the shaping and reshaping of my belly, big hips rolling, the weight of me, the weight of my chest. Not curves, but rolls, stacked, abundant I feel myself shake the floor, I am loud. Clothing myself, I wear big things and bright. I carry my birthright - the refusal to blend in, I create something new - the refusal to try to be smaller. I relish in the revelation of all of me, knowing as I do the hunger for more. My body knew how to break out of the boundaries that were made for it before I did. Encoded in my DNA, my own fat mum has gifted me this- a disorderly, ungovernable form, I need only to follow its lead.

Fat poem
October 2nd 2023

Look at this lovely round head! 
Not one but 2 (two!) beautiful chins!
Plump abundance!
Cheeks like ripe berries erupt in
sweet laughs, words like juice! 

Improbable anatomy my dr says-
Even my arms are overachievers!
Belly rising like a sourdough, triumphant in
savoury laughs that are rich-
Filled with the taste of butter!

Expansive! This world filled with the promise
of my body - overflowing, inflating!
I am a balloon animal!
Laughs that POP, words like 
warm breath and parties!

Love         
         From                 
                   Lydia

 

In this edition of the digest, I will basically just be catching you guys up on what I’ve been doing in the studio! I hope it’s interesting to hear a bit about the logic around the decisions I’ve been making and to get a bit of insight into the processes!

Starting Fresh

A big part of my decision to take a break from designing new patterns was that I felt the cycle of newness and promotion becoming stifling. I lost track a little of what is exciting to me in a design sense and what my vision was for the patterns I wanted to bring into the world. I even ended up cancelling a release we had planned, even though the pattern was entirely finished and only needed testing! Punitive algorithms on the platforms I rely on for sales felt like they were squeezing out small businesses left and right and I was seeing so many brands I love shuttering, especially many of the size-inclusive, sustainable brands that had inspired me to design clothing in the first place. It’s also a difficult thing when your image and personality are coopted long term in service of your income. I don’t think it’s talked about enough, it’s such a strange side effect of self-employment in the social media era! The dynamics of marginalisation play into that aspect so much as well, and it was getting really challenging to be marketing using my fat body in a moment where it feels culturally and politically less welcome not just in fashion spaces, but the world at large.

I’m not unfamiliar with making these difficult decisions around work- canceling sales and launches in favour of my mental and physical health- I’ve done it before, but it is always really frightening on a financial level, and I’m so thankful to the people who have continued to purchase and recommend the amazing patterns we have worked on for the last few years. It is a real privilege to have a digital product and I’ve really appreciated having a cushion during this change of pace that is so necessary and so non-monetisable! I have to remember as someone with mental and physical health conditions that can seriously vary in intensity that life can’t always have a rigid plan or be predictable- to my great chagrin ahah!

New Pattern Development

Since my break, Maria and I (I can’t remember if I’ve introduced her yet! She is the mastermind behind Wild Knits Glasgow and is taking on the pattern maths part of Rose’s job) have been working on two things.

The first is a pattern for a top that can be made three ways- long sleeved, short sleeved, and sleeveless, and uses a beautiful scrap technique to create lovely irregular but ordered stripes. I felt an intense need to get back to what I love most about making patterns - knits you can make one million ways that are silly business decisions on my part bc it means people only need to buy one pattern! I just love real workhorse patterns that you can return to time and again for different looks yeknow? I also really wanted to go back to my rough and ready approach to yarn choices and provide more waste reduction suggestions, as well as having the time to be laboriously slow and perfectionist about fit!

We spent a lot of time in the last few years learning how to do things extremely by the book which I appreciate a LOT, but I’m so excited to be playing around with finding my own style of working. To be honest I don’t think this pattern will launch until autumn! And hopefully that will be ok? There are SO many amazing patterns in my catalogue that I’m so proud of, I feel there should be no rush! I guess the big takeaway is please keep making things from my patterns!

Knitting Machine Exploration!

One of the big way’s I’ve been getting back into creative flow is deciding that this will FINALLY be the year that I figure out how to use a knitting machine in earnest! I’m renting this one from Rose just now and getting so much use out of it. It doesn’t have punch card capacity but is easy to use for intarsia so I have been going to town!!! I didn’t realise that manual machine intarsia was so labour intensive- you still have to hand manipulate the yarns for every row! I started by making a plain banner to embroider a poem onto, then I moved on to making one mostly plain with an intarsia boot and embroidering the poem on afterwards. I made a few practice pieces over christmas and have made wee attempts at more ambitious compositions. I’m still working out the best ways to compose readable designs in this format and what construction works best for me, but I’m so so so soooo happy to be exploring art for its own sake again!

On the business side of things, I discovered that there are very few patterns that are size inclusive for knitting machines because the bed has a limited number of stitches! SO Maria and I have been working together on trying to figure out designing and grading a basic, set-in sleeve pullover in my standard size and shape range that I can potentially use for custom designs using seamed pieces. I’ve never sold custom work because of what feels like the impossibility of being paid fairly for my time, but using the machine I could potentially trial doing a few wee customs? WHO KNOWS! But it’s exciting to have a pattern of my own as a general resource, and I’ve learned sooo much about construction on the machine omg! We seem to be nearing some kind of finish line on this and I can’t wait to show you all a completed garment sample instead of all the weird tiny samples I've been making!

Also bonus fun news the Dyke of Wellington one just got pre selected for the RSA annual exhibition :) Means there’s a chance you might be allowed to see it irl soon? I’m not obsessed with the RSA but from time to time when I need to remember I’m allowed to be an artist too I submit a piece just to like show myself I believe in myself? I think it’s a nice thing to do.

Writing Things

I’ve been working away at writing my novel (I’m not actually sure if I’ve ever admitted that on this newsletter actually!) There’s something a bit vulnerable about talking about writing a novel, it’s such a weird, private process that feels very ephemeral and maybe I’m nervous it seems a bit pretentious? I always want to share little excerpts of first draft bits outside of my insta stories but I don’t know if they’re of interest to anyone. I feel so shy about sharing but I also feel like it helps me to let go of shame or awkwardness when I just put stuff out there and let go of my control, so I feel conflicted. Posting and sharing stuff has always been a way that I track progress and mark for myself that I’ve ticked something off, so long-form writing has really challenged that part of how I work!

Anyway I finally got my word count over twenty thousand and wow it really is starting to feel real now. It’s been a wonderful process so far and I really feel my writing growing so much in it- only thing that’s annoying is how aggressively I’ll have to re-write everything but that’s for future me! Currently I’m just trying to write like 500 words a few days each week and get stuff down.

I’m trying to get back into poetry as wee exercises, but not super into anything from the last few months. I’ll close out by sharing with you a poem I’m proud of from last summer and a silly horny blackout poem I did this morning using an ad from the ‘50s for a self cleaning spark plug.

Two Mums
June 29th 2024

It was nectar at the base of a nose
Unfurling

1
Segment sweet that orange or other 
Fruits segmented on
New napkins each year just because she
Really likes them- she said 
‘I just really think you’ll like them’
Sometimes it’s Denby, heavy plates like
Tasting rocks, deep crouch in 
The lanes between farms 
Puddle-slick in her mouth and 
Nose, unfurling 

It was 
Renewing 

2
She had that notebook with the
Laminated photo of Oscar Wilde 
Cupped hands to her mouth it was 
Curling, her hair where the water
Out-rippled 
Sometimes it’s living wings, tender break
Like cigarette burns or a 
Note about your mother, folded
Out and pinned, out-lived
Renewing 

I couldn’t see her poetry until he died

Okay, that’s me! Hope there was something there that gave you joy or entertained you :)

Love
From
Lydia

I used to read like there was no tomorrow when I was a kid, idk why it dropped off. Probably my phone, and guys my screen time has NOT lowered throughout this process so I’m beginning to worry that my days are longer than everyone else’s. After like at least a decade of hiatus from being a Serious Reader ™️ I figured now is as good a time as any to get back to it.

By the time I hit 30, I’d really like to know what exactly it is that I like in someone else’s writing. It feels important, especially as a novice writer, to be able to find out what I admire, enjoy, and aspire to. But equally importantly, the power of stories to introduce, model, and inhabit new and precious ways of thinking and living is so much more powerful than I remembered! It has been an exciting thing to devour books again! A few were graphic novels, some closer to pamphlet length, some incredibly easy to read, and some that nearly broke me with their sheer, persistent length (ahem, Lanark, 100 Years of Solitude- both of which I actually loved, but yes they are a feat!)

I took recommendations from friends, let the limits of the Glasgow Libraries catalogue shape much of my exploration, and signed back up to the Burning House Books wonderful book club which is run by the amazing Aimee who also happens to be my writing mentor. By the dregs of the year, however, I’ve started to notice that I am finally beginning to have a more crystallised sense of what I’ll find interesting and what I’d like to read next which is so new and empowering! I also have collected a few authors who I can honestly say I’m a fan of and am always excited to come across their works!

In 2025 I would love to be able to read more fantasy, sci fi, poetry, and plays. I don’t feel wonderfully equipped yet to say what I like in some of those genres and honestly guys I’m really struggling to find out which poetry really really speaks to me other than Anne Carson!

I know it’s not the end of the year quite yet, but I have a sense I won’t be finishing much in the next few weeks. So without further ado I present to you the books I loved most in each category I thought of off the top of my head!!!!!

Poetry - Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

As with quite a few of these books, I have already presented this on a previous WLM Digest, but it really was a poetry novel that changed my life! Beginning with comical and engaging dialectical explorations, and her own achingly beautiful translations of ancient poetry fragments, Carson goes on to tell the story of Geryon, a young gay guy in the 90s who also happens to be a red monster with huge wings. It’s funny, poignant, beautiful, and the way she uses words is just unmatched. Each word is chosen with the sensual mastery of a translator, each point made with the clarity and potentiality of an educator, and each character shaped in her genuine and apparent pleasure in the classic stories she is reworking. I will read it over and over.

Fiction - All Fours by Miranda July

This book, frankly, knocked my socks off! I hadn’t really engaged with anything of hers before and this has me desperate for more. It’s such a weird story that sits in this moment of a woman’s mid-life that is usually portrayed as so mundane and familiar, I can’t give away too much about the plot because it keeps taking turns that leave you holding on for dear life. You will feel incredibly horny, stressed, achingly sad, excited and seen when you read it. It’s like she’s trying to win a competition for how many things she can embody so beautifully in her writing- obsessive crushes, postnatal trauma, perimenopause, dancing, interior design, parenting, love that changes, the list goes on. It’s also shockingly easy to read, a treat.

Non Fiction - Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

After I read this book it was like I had been living in a world where I only saw half of everything that existed and suddenly I was seeing everything. It seems hyperbolic to be so sweeping but this truly changed the way I see things, and anyone who met up with me when I was reading it can attest that I couldn’t stop existing in a state of abject awe and wonder at the world. Through the lens of her relationship to her own personal indigenous culture and the related cultures of other groups near her, Wall Kimmerer explores how her paths through the world of ‘hard science’ and inherited knowledge and stories intertwine in her relationship with plants and her local environment. It’s really hard to capture in a short paragraph, she tells ancient stories, explains academic approaches and shares her own experiences in a way that creates an undeniable call for a joyful and relationship-led fight against the world-destroying ways of being that colonialism and capitalism have left for us.

Short Stories - Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Don’t you love it when an author draws you so fully into their creepy, sexy, crazy, dense world so much that you actually can’t shake the stories? Machado’s work has an unmissable cleverness, seamless references to pop culture play alongside well worn folk tales, traumas become a fantasy that make them almost more true to life. I spoke about this one before as well, but I have to say it has stuck with me. The busy, almost cloying inward lives of her protagonists touch on complex themes of inherited anti fatness, abuse in queer relationships, mental health struggles and more. Somehow she fills her work with so much texture, fun, and rich descriptive prose that the heavy content still feels exciting and expansive in a way that keeps you coming back for more.

Memoir - The Years by Annie Ernaux

This memoir really hit me in so many ways at different points. Beginning with her rural post-war upbringing and taking the reader through the many slow modernisations and changes of the 20th century in France, Ernaux brings us with her into her early old age at the start of the 21st century. What is so unique about this book is that she chooses to embody a ‘we’ voice instead of a personal ‘I’- overtly and uncomfortably occupying the collective consciousness of the ‘average’ white, French baby boomer. It isn’t flattering, and in the combination of personal anecdotes and wider political history and context, she writes beautifully to paint a picture of large scale apathy and social injustice. The speed with which the popular opinion adopts a minority scapegoat, the way it adopts and throws out marginalised bodies at will, the short sightedness of political movements that centre only a privileged few. A frustrating but fascinating read, especially as someone not super familiar with French social history. I love reading books written by older women, but more on that another day I guess!

Art Criticism - The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson

Firstly, huge TWs for this book for basically everything, it describes in detail art that deals with horrible, unthinkable subject matter so if you don’t have that in you it’s probably best to avoid. Also a few random and disappointing incidences of ableist language from the author.
I think I had forgotten the particular joy of sitting down to a great art school tutorial with a tutor who just gets what you’re doing until reading this. While I didn’t take away many solid nuggets of specific knowledge, I feel like this book did what the best tutorials do: introduced me to new artists, contextualised ones I was familiar with, posed questions that influence both how I make and see art, and inspired in itself with the charm, talent and knowledge embodied in the person speaking to you. The book grapples with questions such as how cruel is too much? Does the art justify the cruelty? Where are the boundaries in engaging audiences in cruel art practices? Instead of trying to give hard and fast answers, she shares her own changing opinions and tries to help the reader gain a bit of a rubric for forming their own, knowing it may only ever be a one person consensus.

Non Fiction - Crippled by Frances Ryan

Okay, I’m not going to lie this is a Hard Read™️ which I would def not really recommend to anyone who has lived experience of disability or extreme poverty because it is really intense to see everything you knew about how disposable your life/the lives of your disabled community and family are. But for those who don’t quite understand the benefits system, austerity, or have only really heard the propaganda the gov, schools, and the NHS throw at us about how great the UK is for disabled people, this is an ESSENTIAL read. To understand these systemic issues can feel difficult and Ryan does a brilliant job of dividing the issue into understandable segments using personal individual stories as a clear explanation of the scale of the impacts of our government’s attacks on disabled rights.

Graphic Novel - Prokaryote Season by Leo Fox

Okay that was a few heavy ones in a row so let’s finish on something GORGEOUS! Leo Fox is my pick for most exciting emerging comic artist and this book is just a brilliant example of his work. A really relatable story of unrequited messy longing is worked into a sort of post apocalyptic fairytale, a neuroqueer love story (not really) about bodies and self perception and magic and transgression that is illustrated amazingly! Like seriously he puts so so much into every possible space on the page, they heave with decorative borders and characters in great clothes and foliage and weird, satisfying shapes. He’s also only 23 which is WILD and makes me so excited to see where his work will evolve in the coming years. I got Boy Island for my birthday and plan to crack it open on the holidays. It also just feels nice after a lifetime of being really into weird indie graphic novels to find some I like aesthetically that aren’t by self pitying apologetically pervy cishet men lollll.

And that’s all folks! Nothing groundbreaking here tbh, it’s all stuff that is widely recommended by many other people in many other places but yeknow what, I wanted to throw my hat in the ring and maybe inspire some folks to read something next year!

I hope you’re all doing beautiful things in whatever form they take.

Love
From
Lydia

Full 2024 book list in order of completion below :)

Jan-March 24:

📚

• Lanark - Alisdair Gray

• Milk Teeth - Rae White

• Her Body and Other Parties - Carmen Maria Machado

• The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

• Going to Meet the Man - James Baldwin

• The Vegetarian - Han Kang

• Autobiography of Red - Anne Carson

🎧

• Poor Things - Alisdair Gray

• Yellowface - R. F. Kuang

• Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart

• The Waves - Virginia Woolf

• Frenchman’s Creek - Daphne DuMaurier

• Empire of the Sun- JG Ballard

• Rocannon’s World - Ursula le Guin

• Children of Paradise - Camilla Grudova

• Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

• The List- Yomi Adegoki

Apr-Jun 2024

📚

• Greasepaint - Hannah Levine

• All About Love - Bell Hooks

• Janine 1982 - Alasdair Gray

• Blue Horses - Mary Oliver

• Notes from a Native Son - James Baldwin

• My Work - Olga Ravn

• Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin

• The Penelopiad - Margaret Atwood

• If Beale Street Could Talk - James Baldwin

• Something Leather - Alasdair Gray

• The Moon Spins The Dead Prison - Ed: Thomas Abercromby, Rosie Roberts

• Kelvin Walker - Alasdair Gray

• Old Men in Love - Alasdair Gray

• The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson

• Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami

• Decreation - Anne Carson

• Bluets - Maggie Nelson

• Spring and All - William Carlos Williams

• Wise Blood - Flannery O’Conner

• If Not, Winter - Sappho, Anne Carson

• Jazz - Toni Morrison

• Red Doc > - Anne Carson

• The Beauty of the Husband - Anne Carson

🎧

• The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

• Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro

• Young Mungo - Douglas Stuart

• Pinball 1972 - Haruki Murakami

• The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

• The Satsuma Complex - Bob Mortimer

July- Sept 2024

📚

• Teneu - Rosie’s Disobedient Press

• The Plummeting Old Woman - Daniil Kharms

• High Rise - JG Ballard

• In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado

• The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje

• Harsh Cravings - Jason Haaf

• Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarsczuk

• Suppose a Sentence - Brian Dillon

• Food - Gertrude Stein

• Wrong Norma - Anne Carson

• The Years - Annie Ernaux

• Polysecure - Jessica Fern

• Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer

• And Away… - Bob Mortimer

• Intervals - Marianne Brooker

• The Last Sane Woman - Hannah Regel

• Disquiet Drive - Hesse K

• Coasting - River Macaskill

• Ham on Rye - Charles Bukowski

• Will I Ever Have Sex Again - Sofie Hagen

• Eros the bittersweet - Anne Carson

• Abolition Revolution - Aviah Sarah Day & Shanice Octavia McBean

• Ripcord - Nate Lippens

🖍️📕

• Monica - Daniel Clowse

• Prokaryote Season - Leo Fox

• I Am A Bell Maker - Rob Bidder

Oct - Dec 2024

📚

• Paradise - Toni Morrison

• This Golden Fleece - Esther Rutter

• The Book You Want Everyone You Love to Read - Phillipa Perry

• Poor Artists - Zarina Muhammad & Gabrielle De La Puente

• Memoirs of a Beatnik - Diane Di Prima

• Crippled - Frances Ryan

• The Latest Winter - Maggie Nelson

• I Must Be Living Twice - Eileen Myles

• Revolutionary Letters - Diane Di Prima

• FLECK - Alasdair Gray

• The Female Man - Joanna Russ

• A Shining - Jon Fosse

• 100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

• All Fours - Miranda July

• The Art of Cruelty - Maggie Nelson

• Blood and Guts in High School - Kathy Acker

🎧

• The Secret History - Donna Tartt

In Progress

• Against Landlords - Nick Bano

• Confessions of the Fox - Jordy Rosenberg

How is it October already??!! So, we haven’t posted anything on the substack since (checks notes)… July! Blimey! In a way, that’s pretty symbolic of what has been a very busy time at What Lydia Made HQ. Busy and full of change. Behind the scenes, we’ve been working hard on the Joyride Jacket, which we will be launching imminently (watch this space!) As well as another very special pattern… But before we get to that… I have some big news…

Hellos and Goodbyes

You may have seen on Lydia’s Instagram… I’m pregnant! This is my first child, due in mid-November, and what an exciting, surreal, mind-blowing time of expansion it has been! This inevitably means that after 2 wonderful years of working with Lydia I will sadly be leaving WLM next week for maternity leave. Honestly, I have no idea how I’m going to feel once I become a mum, so we’re leaving it a little open-ended. Maybe I’ll be back, maybe I won’t. Regardless, Lydia and I plan to collaborate on projects in the future, and our friendship lives on. I feel so incredibly lucky to have worked with Lydia over the last couple of years and I’ve learnt SO MUCH. It’s sad, but it’s also exciting and I can’t wait to see what happens next… It’s very hard to put into words all the emotions I am feeling. Mainly, I am feeling grateful for all the life circumstances that led me to the precious earth angel, ball of sunshine that is Lydia Morrow <3

Another exciting element of this is that we have not one, but TWO new people joining the WLM team this month: Maria Suessmilch and Becca Lewis.

Maria, aka Wild Knits Glasgow, is a knitwear designer based in Glasgow, who I have been training (training seems like a strong word… she already knew so much!) to take over the grading and more technical stuff I’ve been doing for WLM patterns.

Becca is an artist, also based in Glasgow, with lots of experience in sustainability and project coordination. She’s involved with the Alexandra Park Food Forest, and has previously worked for the Glasgow Women’s Library. She’ll be taking over the more general support work and will no doubt be incredible.

Consider this their soft launch as I’m sure there will be much more in-depth introductions to come, but rest assured they are two absolute gems.

Jiffy Jumper!

Some of you may have seen this post by Novara Media recently, after Kemi Badenoch stated that statutory maternity pay is ‘excessive’. (IN WHAT WORLD, KEMI?!)
Regardless, WLM doesn't have the money to do maternity pay in the traditional way as I work for Lydia as a self-employed person, and my pay comes directly from her Access to Work grant. But Lydia had the idea to try to find a way to find the extra money by designing a baby / child’s jumper! Ingenious and generous I KNOW! As Lydia says, it's important to us to try to do our best to respect and value each other even though it's not a big business and part of that is engaging our audience in this community moment to get a great pattern while also creating a more liveable mat leave for me than the one the gov offers self-employed folks.

So, after the Joyride Jacket, our next pattern will be the Jiffy Jumper! This is a cute pullover for babies and children from 3 months - 12 years old. Above is a prototype I’ve been knitting for my wee wean! The finished design will involve stranded colourwork and embroidery, and I predict it will be the perfect Christmas pressie for all the bab-ies in your life. We’re seeing the jumper as a crowd funder to top up the minimal statutory maternity pay that I am entitled to.

We’ll be sending out a call for testers very soon, so watch this space.

Matrescence

Finding out I was pregnant serendipitously coincided with an incredible podcast on BBC Sounds called ‘Child’, hosted by India Rakusen (who also made the podcast ‘Witch’, which Lydia has mentioned in a previous post, and ‘28-ish Days Later’… both fantastic). Everyone should listen to this podcast, and I mean this sincerely. It has been a gateway into further research and writing for me and I’m so grateful for it. It’s WILD to me how little I knew going into this… about the process of pregnancy, the politics of it, the history, the magic… I’ve been going through a seismic transitional shift! Other recent publications (below) that come highly recommended for anyone interested in diving into both the bodily realities of motherhood and the concept of it are: Matrescence by Lucy Jones (2023), Mother State by Helen Charman (2024), The Long Form by Kate Briggs (2023).

I have been listening to a lot of Kate Bush this week. King of the Mountain came on the radio while I was driving back from Yorkshire through the Scottish borders on Monday, and it floored me. I was sobbing in the car. Her album Aerial came out during another hugely transition time for me and it made me think… if there was ever someone who musically embodies the hope, pain, magic, wisdom and wonder that I’ve been processing the last few months, it’s her. (I have this realisation periodically throughout my life to be honest… Also, also… how had i never noticed that she’s impersonating Elvis at the beginning of that song!? I have such a vivid image of her in the studio recording those opening lines like ‘the king’. Ah, I love her). I’d love to end this post with some Kate Bush, but between Aerial, The Red Shoes and The Sensual World it’s hard to choose a final song. Instead, I’ve made a playlist (quelle surprise!) of my current top Kate songs. (Please enjoy David Gilmour’s explosive guitar solo on Rocket’s Tail. As my baby’s due in November this song felt especially pertinent).

HUGE love,

Rose xxxxx

Tall plants dance, flashing their violet flowers as a gull dives, liquid smooth above the sharp-rippled water. Putting your knitting aside for a moment, you pull a pepper out of the sandwich you picked up before you got here and take a bite. The door is open and you can hear birdsong drifting in from the young trees. It’s corny but you tear up a little when Judee Sill sings, and you sing with her:

‘I’ll tell you a secret, I’ve never revealed:
However we are, is ok’

I started writing this week’s newsletter in a bothy in the highlands on a 24 hour trip away to celebrate my ten year wedding anniversary. After a few exhausting and mentally fraught weeks of work and summer holiday, it was everything I needed and more and I feel so privileged to be able to be refreshed in this way. Walking along overgrown paths filled with wild plants up to a castle ruin, I felt like I was back in my childhood. We wandered down a grassy slope to a stony beach, I searched for shells and pretty stones. Slowly, I stepped on dry seaweed, letting it pop under my shoes - a mixture of bubble wrap and autumn leaves. Scotland is a really beautiful country. Hello lovely folks.

This week we will be sharing some lovely things and a test knit for our new pattern the Joyride Jacket. Scroll to the end for the test details!

Lovely Things Report

This one is for i-phone users, but I think some other phones have a similar capacity? Did you know you can use your phone camera to identify plants and animals? I didn’t! If you view a photo in the camera roll and swipe up to where you’d usually only find the metadata you can just wait a second and it’ll often pull up a recommendation of what plant or animal it thinks you have photographed.

So far I have used it to identify that a ‘weed’ in my garden was in fact a type of wild spinach often called Lambsquarters thats very edible and has been a lovely addition to my dinners. I also have been using it with my kid to identify birds! Lately we have been spending a lot of time speculating on bird drama, they are very entertaining! R’s favourite are the Moorhens at our local park who love to terrorise the pigeons.

We also managed to visit the Yorkshire Sculpture Park last week which was truly wonderful and also facilitated my first experience of using a non-ambulatory mobility aid! Booking a scooter at YSP was so easy and did not require any special ‘proof of disability’ which, shockingly, is not guaranteed (in Athens I was grilled outside of the lift down from the acropolis! Like sorry, I don’t have my ADP grant forms on me currently lol!!) The staff were super helpful and friendly, and the scooter itself was SO comfortable and would definitely comfortably support users much fatter than me. It fundamentally reshaped what would have been a short and painful visit only using my cane into something expansive, relaxed, and so joyful!

The park itself is just wonderful. I love large scale artworks so much. The combination of wide-open fields and green spaces, huge trees, sheep, and water with the art was such a beautiful alternate to the white-space gallery. My kid also really liked it, and racing the scooter only added to their fun! I highly recommend it as a visit for anyone, and especially disabled folks who don’t always have access to green space. There are also free tickets for carers available.
Note- the scooter does require the use of your right hand, making a fist and tilting back and forward to power it.

I wrote a little poem to remember this visit by (it should be middle aligned but I don’t know how to do that on here hehe):

Approaching Kimsooja
July 5th 2024

The setting is ‘hare’ and I am racing my kid,
Measured spin down the grass verge they are rolling and my 
Chair is rolling and the big needle is stitching the sky to the 
Ground where my feet won’t touch. 

Where the space opens up like a new friend, where the 
Trees turn away and the slope makes short work of the
View which of course is all awe and
Wonder how it always is when something is 
Iridescent and so tall. I am not walking for the 
First time, not heavy. 

Two tracks mark where the wheels flatten
I thought I was a cleaver but it’s not so ominous, I
Understand I am 
A needle - and this is all 
Just quilting.

‘A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir’

Test Knit Applications Now Open - Joyride Jacket

Our new design, the Joyride Jacket is going to be in testing from
July 19 - October 4 2024 (a total of 11 weeks)! If you test with us you will receive a fully formatted pattern that has gone through multiple rounds of technical editing as well as proof reading, it is as finished as possible, barring some photos that are still pending. We want testers who can help us find teensy typos and double check the fit- that’s it, we don’t expect you to be doing any of the hard stuff!

‘The Joyride Jacket is a real step up for your knitted wardrobe! Knit in stockinette with clever folded hem and yoke details, well-placed short rows, and a beautiful zipper detail - nobody will believe you made it yourself! With sports-wear inspired seamless saddle shoulders and simple intarsia detailing, this jacket packs a punch without relying on too many fiddly techniques. Inspired by Motorcycle and Car racing jackets, I like to think this piece will bring a little excitement to your knitting life!’

We don't have official photos yet but I think you should be able to get a decent idea from some of the photos shared here. The main changes between the pics and the final design will be some reshaping of the intarsia line where the green and beige meet so more green is visible at the front and less at the back, and the addition of a zipper. (Also I didn’t get a chance to really tidy up the folded hem welts that got messed up in blocking so obv those will look nicer in the final!! This sample has been knit and reknit in so many bits so many times so please excuse my not 100% ready pics!)

This pattern is graded using ‘women’s’ sizing charts but is designed with a wide variety of body shapes in mind. This style is unisex and should also fit a lot of cis men and other people who usually use ‘men’s’ sizing charts. The sleeves and body are both every so slightly cropped and there are options for hip shaping and bust shaping to fit a wide range of shapes. For more information on the yardage, sizing, and schematic, please click through to the application form- you can see it even if you aren’t going to apply :)

Brooklyn Tweed provided their beautiful Arbor yarn for this sample and will provide a 15% off discount code for testers. It’s a really nice middle ground between the superwash merino I usually use and the more rustic pure wool I’ve used in the past. It has nice structure but it is also way more wearable against bare skin imo! If you need full yarn support to participate it should be possible for us to organise that… just let us know in your application!

The test will take place on Slack. We’ve done this for the last couple of tests and love it! There’s such a chill and supportive vibe. Testers are expected to complete their garment within the allotted time and fill out a feedback form before the deadline, of course we understand when life gets in the way and it’s impossible- but please don’t apply if you are very unlikely to be able to complete the test. We love it when folks are active in the Slack and can provide fit pics so we can get confirmation that we did the grading right, but taking or sharing photos on social media is not a requirement of the test, just a lovely added help to us if you’re up for it!

Testers will receive the finalised pattern, as well as a code for a free pattern of their choice from the catalogue :)

If you're interested in applying, please click the link below!

Apply for the Test Knit!!

Looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks for reading!

Lydia and Rose x

After a bit of a substack hiatus, it’s me, Rose, bringing you the latest news from WLM HQ. And what news! This week we launch the CURIOUS CROP.

Curious Crop on Ravelry

Curious Crop on Our Website

I love this pattern with all my heart. It’s been a true labour of love for Lydia and me. We must have started work on it over a year ago when Lydia dreamt up the idea of a peephole tank top in april/may 2023, inspired by Joyce from Edward Scissorhands.

Our initial iteration was called the “tattle top”, and there were several significant fit issues with this first attempt. So, we went back to the drawing board, and in March this year we’d finalised a new version of the renamed ‘curious crop’… but it still wasn’t quite right! The gauge stretched out too much, the negative ease wasn’t tight enough, the length was just slightly too long, and the armholes were too high. All small tweaks but they felt important.

As they say, the third time’s a charm. Now we’ve changed the gauge and sorted out those issues (no small feat considering we also graded the holes), I believe we have designed… not to toot our own trumpet… the per-fect cropped tank top. After a fantastic test knit, it is time to launch the Curious Crop into the world!

Curious Crop on Ravelry

Curious Crop on Payhip

What a total joy it has been seeing all our beautiful testers’ makes and photos. Can we please give it up for the FIT?! Ooof! As ever, at the centre of our design process is the importance that the pattern will look great on a wide range of body shapes. Knitted in finger-weight yarn, there are two views: plain and holey, and 5 sizes of optional bust shaping. It’s in Sizes 1 - 11, roughly fitting a 28 - 67 inch full bust, without bust darts. The full schematic measurements for the garment are below:

Thanks for reading! I hope you’re having a brilliant summer so far!

Stay curious!

Lots of love,

Rose x

My biggest lesson from my first summer of gardening was that things want to grow. I don’t know why, but I had assumed it would be a battle. The resilience and persistence of these silly little plants was a bit of a revelation to me! The second biggest lesson was the fact that weeds in general are just indigenous or self-seeding plants growing where we don’t want them to be - it’s not really much deeper than that. It’s kind of horrifying to recognise how far-reaching and insidious the grasp of colonial perspectives can be on our view of literally anything. Fear-driven gardening - fear of sharing the land, control-driven gardening - the expectation that we even could control the land. Gardening that expects failure or frames different outcomes as failure, when the outcome is always growth! What an absolutely dire approach. Mushrooms, moss, or the full tummy of a slug are not inherent failure!

I told my friend about some pansies my kid had planted in 2023. In the shadow of the lush cucumber vines and dense carrot tops they had failed to thrive the first time around. But this spring, in one of the raised beds, they have miraculously self-seeded and are flourishing around the weeds. ‘Nature has a lot to teach us!’ she remarked. In a culture where the way we live is so intentional about creating and defining ‘nature’ and our separation from it, it’s quite beautiful to be reminded of this.

The first half of this year has been extremely challenging for me. There’s been a lot of upheaval- expected and unexpected, and I’m trying to recognise the space for growth. Some things I had really invested in haven’t panned out, some I thought would bring one outcome have brought something entirely different. Personally, nationally, and internationally, there is a feeling of lack of control right now that can be really challenging for my little autistic brain! I find the little lessons of the garden this week have been really anchoring in a time where I feel very unmoored. It feels so important to remember that at the root of growth and flourishing, it is necessary to recognise colonial and capitalist mindsets. Personal soothing, healing, comfort, and care come hand in hand with resistance!

On that note, outside of your personal life, I want to encourage you to take an action or two, I’ve suggested a few below that I feel are concrete ways to engage in anti colonial practice:

Stop arms exports to Israel

Buy an E-sim for a Gazan

Respond to NHS Trans Consultation

Studio Updates

The Curious Crop test is coming to a close in 2 weeks, and I’m so excited to report that it’s honestly been the most successful test we have ever had! How cute is my hairdresser (below) in her size 3 sample? I would say the two biggest things that have helped with this were the change to Slack as the host for the test group rather than Instagram messaging, and the addition of a proof-reading step to our process. Now after the tech-edit is complete, we pass the pattern to a proof-reader before we send it to testers, and it’s really cut down on silly mistakes and confusion! Would highly recommend this step to any other pattern writers!

We have a few other wee patterns brewing, but I need to hold myself back from sharing too much too soon hehe! I’ve also started trying to write a book! 🤓 (not a knitting one, sorry) so my brain is a bit elsewhere.

Yet Another Book Rec!

The Fall of Kelvin Walker by Alasdair Gray is so so fun! It’s missing a lot of the darkness and magic I love in some of his other work, BUT it’s SO funny so I forgive it. I kept reading it at a cafe while I was waiting for my kid to finish drama and having to stop myself from laughing out loud! It’s quite short and readable- a really good character study. Worth a read :)

Okay that’s all from me today!

Love

From

Lydia

It’s been a while since I wrote for you all here, and I have found myself thinking often of the ways in which my brain and body prevent me from the regularity of life that people outside this foggy world of physical disability and neurodivergence seem to be able to experience. I wish I had written more- I couldn’t. I want to feel guilt about it- I shouldn’t. My ever growing trail of conditions is starting to make me sound like a highly decorated soldier - Lydia Morrow hEDS, PCOS, POTS, ADHD, ASD, but it’s a special kind of horror to be at war with your own body. Right now I am in bed, I have lugged myself into a sort of semi-upright position. My head is just high enough to enable me to type with my laptop balanced on one knee, and this is almost too much for me today.

The reality for so many of us is that we weave for ourselves a tiny mist around the knowledge of our brains and bodies. Where they fall short, we apply a bit of blur and think about other things. For me, a smudge starts around my mouth and works its way downward over my body. Inside my head it starts around my needs and stretches itself over my desires. Desire is painful and confusing, need is distorted by ache and fatigue. Awareness times are painful, a reminder that not everyone exists as a vapour like I do. I used to want to fight for recognition, the powerful drive of the recently diagnosed. When you are freshly, finally, officially ‘disabled’ there is so much anger and relief. There is so much to process. I wanted to become a teacher, an advocate, and in many ways I have done those things, but now I feel quite lost in the mourning.

I didn’t know it was EDS awareness month until it jumped out at me from a viral Guardian Article by Daisy Lafarge. After reading the first few paragraphs I had to stop because it was too much for me to face another version of my experience. My weeks, for the most part, are repetitive. Over the years, I have pulled a life for myself out of the corners and cuttings of the life I wanted. It’s good, I am creative, I am joyful, I have friends I love, I am usually able to avoid meltdowns and flares, and my bed is nearly always in the next room. But I still find myself shutting down- loneliness and jealousy are impractical emotions. Anger too, can only be turned towards my own body- foggy down below my eyeline - so I turn it off too. I don’t want to be aware! I am busy being ignorant, ignorant of a body and brain that still so desperately need to be loved and cared for.

In the midst of this, a question from my therapist:
’and what does your body want to do in this moment?’
It throws me for a loop. For a week I am more depressed than I have been in years, I am a gaping abyss of what my body wants to do in this moment. I get addicted to my phone. I fold myself back into the blanket of my mist. I try to make more friends, I feel like I have to explain my conditions to every new person.

I want to be fought for, I do, I want awareness. I want to be held, protected, for space to be made. Disabled bodyminds deserve the world, we do. But it is too much for me to hold. My life has always been characterised by me being ‘too much’ for others, and my reality is too much for me. It’s hard to think of actions, it’s hard to imagine what we need, when we are already folding ourselves away into tiny existences. When I write about disability I am afraid it is limiting, that my feelings will act as a confirmation for those who see us only as recipients of charity, pitiable. So many of us feel the pressure to turn it around and speak about the good bits, of course empowerment is important! But disability, as with any other experience is life, a fullness. How can we hope in one month to create ‘awareness’? We are so vast, so disparate. On some days we are despair, some elation, sometimes it is certainly just a normal day and it passes and we have bodies like everyone else does.

I work for love. For the ridged, loose skin of my belly and my underarms, weak collagen stretching until it is ‘anatomically improbable’ (in the words of my doctor.) For the soft curved hillock at the base of my neck, formed by a lifetime of joints too painful for good posture. For the stern pangs of a subluxed spine, the arm joints popped out by too-heavy bags, the weight of exhaustion, the sun allergy, the alcohol allergy, the grass allergy, the mystery allergy. For the bleeding that lasts for years. For the voice that is too loud and the thoughts that are too many. I can settle for awareness.

The quote on my new tattoo is one I misremembered from the Song of Solomon, an ancient love poem that is included in the Bible. It has stayed with me for over a decade, through the painful untangling that came from divesting from the religion I was born into, the birth of my child, and the discovery of my many diagnoses. I think a lot of things through those words- it changes for me in different phases. Right now at the time of tattooing, an awareness month, it has a special meaning. I think about my body as a protest, the body as a banner.

I think about existence in a marginalised body as an act of resistance. Revolt against systems of oppression is an act of love, we feel this. I find it hard to live in myself and so I choose to be a banner, I hold myself up. Be aware! Disabled lives are an act of love! Awareness months are too much for me and yet I demand it, I holler across the ache and mist, I clamour - be aware!

And now a poem I wrote in York:

The King’s Book of York Heroes
(War Memorial at the York Minster)


Behind and below those names
Of men war-dead 
‘AS DYING AND BEHOLD WE LIVE’
Wooden cupboards
I count maybe 5 in the shadow
Name-lined with
Gilded names
Dark, quiet wood with rows of 
Women’s names
Of women war-dead.

As dying and behold they die
I guess?
I wrote it down. 

Where her sisters, two of them (dead)
Pointed window-ward
(dead, war-dead?)
With urgency to fix this- the bride 
Of Christ (dead)
Stained glass as tall as the armpit
Of the Statue of Liberty
‘One for the Americans ha ha’
‘Ha ha yes’
I shoot a wry smile at the ghosts.

‘The sister’s window for the sisters’
She said
I wrote it down.

He called them the most important 
Cupboards in the UK
(They are screens)
(Wood screens)
They are hard to see but
When I look
I feel like I am Helen Little
Needing my sisters (dead)
(just dead)
Kid-sisters- I was just a kid.

Lots of Scottish Women 
Were doctors 
I wrote it down. 

For Helen, hard amber of grief 
(war-dead)
Translucent panes (like amber) so
The sun has to 
Squeeze through tiny gaps
Ghost dance 
White cassocks whirling 
In the cupboards which are for
War-dead women
And girls, just dead.

This place is heaven he said
The light
I wrote it down. 

And now a book recommendation:

My Work by Olga Ravn is essential reading, I think, for anyone who is ever considering having children. More wholly, however, it could be essential reading for anyone who knows people who have had children, or who know parents, or even who have parents! If you, like me, experienced postnatal depression or any other parental mental health issues, it is a painful but incredibly validating read, I felt so so much less alone after reading it. Beautiful, scattered poetry and prose make for easy and entertaining reading, regardless of your interest level in parenting. She brings all the dark unreality of her earlier work The Employees to this supposedly commonplace experience with a generosity, honesty, and art that is exciting to experience. I hope to see more from her soon!

Alrighty, that’s all folks!
I forgot to write anything at all about business so… here’s a reminder that I have a website full of beautiful knitting patterns that you can purchase, or you can find me on ravelry!

Love
From
Lydia

Beautiful Books!

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

Yeknow honestly I had no clue what to expect from this- it’s very much not something I would have picked up had it not been on the recommendation of a friend. A ‘novel in verse’ it’s an epic poem! So close to prose it teases you a little but the persistence of the poetry of it is just exciting. Beautiful, joyful, so sad, so funny. It really worked for me and it’s such a quick read. I highly recommend.

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"Geryon was a monster everything about him was red
Put his snout out of the covers in the morning it was red
How stiff the red landscape where his cattle scraped against
Their hobbles in the red wind
Burrowed himself down in the red dawn jelly of Geryon's
Dream

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Geryon's dream began red then slipped out of the vat and ran
Upsail broke silver shot up through his roots like a pup

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Secret pup At the front end of another red day"

It starts with some beautiful, loose translation of classical poem fragments (obsessed with the one above), and then indulges in all these amazing and funny framing devices before jumping in to just the most beautiful study of a young gay man who is also a monster from the labours of Hercules. It’s hard to explain but so lovely ok?

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“Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwiches.
Geryon took three and buried his mouth in a delicious block of white bread filled with tomatoes and butter and salt.

He thought about how delicious it was, how he liked slippery foods, how slipperiness can be of different kinds.

I am a philosopher of sandwiches, he decided. Things good on the inside."

Oh please just read it- or lmk if you already had! I had such fun with my dad (who also has a fun substack on here) chatting about it together and reading each other our fave parts- but he still has my copy so I can’t share my FAVE quote cause I forgot to take a photo of it haha!

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Okay everyone the hype is LEGIT like wtf these stories are INCREDIBLE.

I am unfortunately a product of my background and I am actively working on unlearning the instinct of like ‘oh everyone thinks it’s cool? I probably wont like it’ gross ‘cool girl’ 2010s male gaze nightmare ok???? I’m not proud of it, but here we are. SO, I’d avoided this assuming I’d be disappointed- I WAS NOT.

I’m only half way thru because I changed over to a James Baldwin collection that I only have a 2 week special loan of from the library I need to finish but ooooooft these first 4 stories have me obsessed.

The way CMM writes is, for me, almost perfect. The mix of realism, magic, poetry, long silly sentences, gut wrenching sadness, real true people joy, good sex (!!) and a bit of inherent, beautifully rendered politics is just pure gold. In some of the stories she uses these wonderful structures like an inventory of a character’s sexual experiences, or retellings of episodes of Law and Order SVU, to lead you so sneakily into the richest narrative in a way you don’t notice until you’re in the thick of it.

She’s got a true talent for world and mood building in the short story form which is not a given, and she doesn’t leave you hanging with simplistic ‘dun dun duuuuun’ moments. I feel like this is something even the short story greats (ahem, looking at you Ray Bradbury) don’t always execute super well!

You should definitely read it if you haven’t already! But I’m so late to the game so you probably have hahah.

What We’ve Been Up To!

This year has really taken a little time for us to kick into gear, we got sidetracked by some secret stuff (hehe) and then also, we are trying to do a Creative Scotland application and we somehow just can’t finish it even tho it should be relatively straightforward 😩 but I believe in us!!!

But this week has been a really nice, productive, change of pace. We took a bit of time at the start to really communicate about stuff that was holding us back from doing our best work, and coming up with strategies for better structure! It can be hard sometimes navigating these tiny small businesses and the boundaries and communication that keeps them going. We have spoken tonnes about how to make a safe and comfortable work environment for each other over the past year - and I’m so proud of us for how we are actually taking action on that.

When it’s just two of you, or a small team that doesn’t super subscribe to traditional ways of doing business, it can be really difficult to be honest and say something like ‘hey when we rescheduled that at the last sec it was actually quite stressful’- there’s no evil management or HR department to turn to, you just gotta rely on each other! And I’m happy to report that Rose, as always, is just a wonder of a person to work with and the changes we have made to our strategy have already been so helpful. ❤️

I really wanna encourage other folks in small biz that it’s possible to communicate in healthy ways about awkward things and the outcomes can be great! The biggest change we made this week was that Rose introduced me to Trello. It’s been really really helpful being able to visualise all the tasks we need to do and both be able to access them and move/add them as we do stuff, rather than just keeping them all hidden in my notebook, it feels much more accessible for both of us, at least for now!

We were a few weeks behind, in part because of the new pattern we were trying to get into testing needing to be totally re-done because the stitch gauge was off! 😩 but we managed to get it off for tech editing yesterday! 💪 This leads us to….

…Can-Do Cardigan Launch!!!!!!

After making the first samples in NOVEMBER, I am so happy to finally announce that this cardigan pattern is available! It’s available on both Ravelry and my website if Rav is inaccessible for you. As always, I also provide discount codes that can be used no questions asked if you need financial support to access our patterns!

Buy Can-Do Cardigan on Ravelry

Buy Can-Do Cardigan on My Website

The Can-Do Cardigan incredibly versatile, with 2 finishing options (button band and i-cord), 3 chest options (no shaping, cup 1 and cup 2), and 3 body options (straight full length, hip-shaping full length, and cropped). You can basically make a huge range of simple, wearable v-neck cardigans for different shapes and vibes all from this pattern!

I always try to encourage folks to be creative with our patterns and design their own colourwork (like I did in my white version above), and I’m so happy to show you a selection of tester projects worked plain…

…. and with fun intarsia/embroidery!

It’s our first cardigan pattern and I’m so happy with how it turned out- I can’t wait to see more projects, and I hope you’ll tell your buds about it!

Thanks so much for reading along with me and making it this far! I hope everyone has a great spring holidays and that your kids are nice to you if they’re off school hehe!

Love
From
Lydia

This top has actually been a SUPER long time coming- my first sample of it was nearly a full year ago and it took a long time to get it right. It’s a cropped-but-not-AS-Cropped tank top with options for a plain view with no hole, or a sexy lil peekaboo moment.

As with all our negative-ease designs, it has 5 cup size options for boobs/rounded chests, it also has some gentle waist shaping for best fit. I tried it on my partner who has the same upper chest measurement as me (he’s a cis man with rounded chest/belly) and it fit really nicely so I’m really confident about the fit across the board!

The lovely people at NICE Yarns provided me with yarn support on this one and have said they would be willing to provide yarn support to a handful of testers who wouldn’t be able to afford to participate, BUT its a super low yardage project anyway! It only took me 180g of fingering weight yarn in size 7 with cup 3!

We did the last test through slack instead of Instagram messages and it was SO much more chill of a vibe, so we will be doing that again and hopefully it’ll be another roaring success :)

SO if you’d like to test this one (it’ll be a 9.75 week test running thru april/may/june- more info in the link below) just click through and apply!

Find Out More and Apply!!!

Thank u for reading! Stay tuned for more cardigan news next week and maybe a fun normal newsletter soon as well!

Love
From
Lydia

I’m so excited to share our new and improved Rumble Raglan pattern. This has been such a popular pattern since Lydia launched it way back in May 2021. It was her first knitted garment pattern!

Rumble on Ravelry

Rumble on Payhip

Since the Rumble Raglan’s launch, we’ve learned so much more about pattern writing, so have been working on a few changes to ensure that it can be the best possible fit. For example, we noticed a few common issues with necklines in the smaller sizes and significantly, the original pattern had no bust darts, and the yoke was too long which had an effect on the overall length of the top and meant that it tended to ride up when you lift your arms.

BUT NOT ANYMORE! We’ve worked our magic to fix all of this. Specifically:

• The neckline cast-on has changed for the smaller sizes and size 9.

• There are extra short rows in all sizes, with additional ones for sizes 1-3

• Bust darts in 5 cup sizes

• Length feels a little longer because we moved the arm up, but the total length is still the same

• There is more gauge and stretch information and minor formatting changes for clarity.

Lydia is wearing a Size 6 with cup 2 bust shaping, Abbie is wearing Size 3 with cup 2 (Lydia thinks this is possibly a size too big for Abbie).

NB. The sizing for Rumble Raglan is slightly different to our other patterns so make sure you check your upper bust measurement against the size. It’s in Sizes 1 - 9, which is the same as Sizes 2 - 10 in other patterns (roughly a 31 - 63 inch full bust… without bust darts).

Rumble on Ravelry

Rumble on Payhip

(As ever, If you could just click on the Ravelry link, that would really help!)

By the way, you can now generate AI images within SubStack. This is what came up when I typed ‘Rumble Raglan’:

(I felt this needed sharing 😂)

Happy Rumfble-ing!

Please do pardon me if I send a little supplementary something on Thursday additional to this, I hope it’s ok!

This one isn’t a long read, it’s mostly about me- but if you’re lovely and make it to the end, you get a little treat (hearing me speak in my rusty old Scottish accent.) The first bit is more of a context thing and the second is a short essay- I really hope you like them.

Last week I visited The Pyramid at Anderston for a showing of Poor Things, hosted by The Alisdair Gray Archive who I have been following closely since becoming newly obsessed. To be honest it was a sort of euphoric experience to me rewatching Poor Things with an audience of people who went in ready to enjoy it, hearing everyone laugh at the jokes and the sex and the fun of it all.

At the start there was a Q&A with the Custodian, Sorcha Dallas. Some of the things that were said hit home so much for me about why I’ve ben finding Gray’s work so exciting lately. It felt so amazing to be in a room filled with people who are passionate about Scottish art and hopeful politics and weird creativity. On top of all that the experience sort of drew out in me this growing impulse I’ve had towards writing about place and Glasgow in particular where I’ve now spent the majority of my life.

I’d been reading Lanark that day and this quote had really hit me, and hit doubly strong during the Q&A:

"Glasgow is a magnificent city” said McAlpin. "Why do we hardly ever notice that?" "Because nobody imagines living here," said Thaw. McAlpin lit a cigarette and said, "If you want to explain that I'll certainly listen.

"Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively. What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That's all. No, I'm wrong, there’s also the cinema and library. And when our imagination needs exercise we use these to visit London, Paris, Rome under the Caesars, the American West at the turn of the century, anywhere but here and now. Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music-hall song and a few bad novels. That's all we've given to the word outside. I's all we've given to ourselves.”

-An excerpt from Lanark by Alisdair Gray

While in that room, I felt a sort of massive wash of unexpected sadness sweeping over me about my accent, hearing so many audibly Scottish people talking so passionately. Going through the art school and the subsequent years existing in a heavily English and international arts scene here, I haven’t been as conscious of my lack of regional accent except as something to explain away ‘oh haha yea I know I don’t sound Scottish, I grew up here but I eventually had to choose one accent.’

I moved to Scotland with my family at age 6. As a kid, I developed an East Dunbartonshire accent with relative ease and used it when speaking to anyone from the UK. In my late teens, when moving to a new school, I made the calculated decision to commit to just one accent and stuck to it. I always say my American accent feels most natural to me and I think that’s true, but I don’t feel American. It’s incredible to see how, since the 80s when Lanark was published, Glasgow has become much more of a space in people’s imaginations, but I feel difficulty in claiming myself as a part of that line of Scottish Creatives.

It’s interesting existing as an immigrant experiencing an incredible amount of privilege within my immigrant experience. As an American, I didn’t experience even near the same amount of prejudice and othering as people who have immigrated from other countries, so I thought of the impact on my life as minimal. In adulthood, however, I’ve started to recognise the massive amounts of trauma and confusion that such a huge change can have on a tiny mind, I see the instability I still have today both in my internal identity and my immigration status.

A while ago when we were in town, I was trying to remind my friend that Glasgow is an incredibly beautiful city. I got so caught up in it and excited, big hand gestures up and over the wild, mouldy beauty of this city that is home, I felt like there was more than I could ever describe. I remembered summer club at the Kelvin Hall, daily walks along the tow path into the city, the new Gurdwara next to the new Gaelic School next to the endless old churches, the beauty of the subsiding tenements and crumbling halls, and I felt like the luckiest person in the entire world.

Yesterday was Gray Day, a new celebration of the life and work of Alisdair Gray, run by his Archive staff. I wasn’t able to attend the actual celebrations at the Oran Mor, but it was a day where I felt that to be a Scottish Creative working in Glasgow is the best thing I could possibly be, and I want to claim it despite the mixed muddle of my past! SO I wrote this little essay about the time when I moved here and how I got my Scottish Accent.

My life began in Scotland as adventure. Sleeping on the stage in an old church, all five of us got hives from old bedding stored for too long. There I learned about new flavours of crisps like salt and vinegar and cheese and onion- smokey bacon were my favourite. My feet grew from size 13 to size 1 which was vaguely disappointing. I learned that you can eat buttered pasta most days and that it’s a lot of work to find affordable housing.

Next, a flat in Kelvindale where a wild neighbour girl showed me how to lift my shirt over my head and run through the closes, hunting frogs and toads who had wandered in from the canal. My siblings and I dug holes every day in the tiny shared garden next to the defunct coal storage box. I kissed a girl with red hair- my first kiss- and my friend’s dad taught us that ‘wee man’ was Glasgow slang for a penis.

Life was the train from Anniesland to Central Station, the train from Central Station to Motherwell, the train from Motherwell back to Central, and the train back home once more, via Spar if we were lucky. Sometimes we would get banana chips, sometimes mum would challenge us to see who could find the best family breakfast for 50p. My friend Connor from down the road taught me how to dance to Hey! Baby!, I hadn’t really heard pop music before.

At Kelvindale Primary School I had dyed red hair and stripey socks and an American accent. A boy taught me what 'fancying someone’ means so he could tell me how he felt about me. I learned about flats and terraced housing and bungalows and the difference between detached and semi detached. I learned about the Glasgow Coat Of Arms. I learned about Ramadan. I’d never been to school before. I turned 7 that autumn, and it was the first year I felt older.

When we moved to Bishopbriggs we sometimes had a car- a carousel of old, unreliable vehicles passed on from friends and supporters. My favourite breakdown was the one where we left pools of rainbow oil leaking slick down the street behind us like a trail of breadcrumbs. I took a bus to school with the kids from the Gaelic unit, my brother had a blue mohawk and an American accent.

At the Glasgow Islay Junior Gaelic Choir I learned that I was an alto, and that I was too loud for everyone. At my new school I learned that if I read all my books upside down or in a computer voice I wouldn’t get so bored. My neighbour Isobel taught me how to knit the way she had learned in school. I learned about World War Two and wrote letters to an imagined husband on the front that made me cry. I made business cards with my full name, address, and phone number on them. I learned how to speak in a Scottish accent. They stopped letting me wear stripey socks.

There’s a joke that Scottish people use the word ‘fuck’ as punctuation. In high school I learned to swear. My classmates made me say ‘tuna’, ‘jaffa cakes’, and ‘pasta’ in my American accent and they didn’t believe it was real. My English teacher let me read extra books from the cupboards, I made friends, I spent my time drawing in the Bishopbriggs library. I spoke differently at home.

Here is a silly little recording of my two accents, transcript below.

“[In American Accent] Okay for context, I thought I should probably share what my two accents sound like, just so you get a little context for the story and maybe believe me a little more. I don’t know, I haven’t used the Scottish one in a long time, so maybe it’s not believable. Anyway I’ll read the same thing twice.

Last week I visited the Pyramid at Anderston for a showing of Poor Things, hosted by the Alisdair Gray Archive, who I’ve been following closely since becoming newly obsessed.

Now Scottish: [In Scottish Accent] lLast week I visited the Pyramid at Anderston for a showing of Poor Things, hosted by the Alisdair Gray Archive, who I’ve been following closely since becoming newly obsessed.

[In American Accent] Again, I’m not very used to using that voice anymore so maybe you don’t think it’s believable if you’re from Scotland, but it kind of gets you an idea.”

Love
From
Lydia

This feels huge. Simultaneously hopeful and melancholic. I always find it a strange time of year, where you’re almost willing time to speed up, but also cherishing all the small changes happening all around. Like right now, it’s 5.26pm and it’s still light!

For today’s post i’ve made a playlist of songs that I feel embody that almost spring potential, yet are somehow quite sad too. It’s a short one today, but I hope you’re all doing alright.

Sending love,

Rose xx

Honestly, I want as many people as possible to read this entry, but it also contains spoilers for both the film and the book. Most of what I write will not actually be related to specific plot points and I don’t intend to tell the story of the film for this as, it is not marketing, but ofc in some ways it’s unavoidable! I’ve been yearning for chat about this so please, comment, share, message me about it- my ideas and opinions may change with conversation!

Poor Things (2023) Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos is basically Elf for grown up art girls!!! (Child in adult body with magical, complicated multi parent scenario encounters ‘The Real World’, sensory seeking, lust, and comedy ensue- maybe we should also watch Poor Things every christmas, just for balance?)
Based on part of a thoughtful, political book set in my hometown, I feel like the movie was an aesthetic, sensory, pleasure-adventure-romp dark tale. I hear and see many valid criticisms of the film, and I won’t try at any point to undermine anyone’s experience, but for me the film, followed by the book, has been an overwhelmingly positive thing.

I LOVED it (which apparently is controversial?) and I LOVED the book, but looking at them in comparison is even more intriguing and layered and exciting. I love picking apart stories, even ones I love, and how digging in on a critique can improve our cultural literacy and even add excitement!

Since watching this movie, my brain has been BUZZING. I got the book on Libby via my local library and read it as fast as possible and gosh, I almost can’t contain the pure bubbling inspiration, thought, theories, criticism endless brain pings that have ensued. There are infinite directions this could take, and I could write about this forever. Of course this article won't be perfect, I’ll have to cut down significantly, and I’ll miss important points, but I think it's my new special interest and I really have to get some words out!

Male Gaze, Framing, and Comparisons with the Book

By my interpretation, this story (as intended by Alisdair Gray) is about a critique of the male gaze- not feminism, not privilege, not ableism (though all these elements are at play.)
Of course, a male director and writer and cinematographer, no matter how hard they try will not be able to make this critique as well as they try to, and the central flaw of the film as opposed to the book is trying to tell the story from the main character, Bella Baxter’s perspective, whilst also seemingly trying to maintain the male gaze that is intrinsic to the horror of the story they tell. I think this is why many folks have disliked and misunderstood Lanthimos’s interpretation.

In the book, Alisdair Gray finds himself in possesion of an envelope containing a book written by a man - Max Mccandles- about the life of a woman - Bella Baxter. The envelope ALSO contains a letter containing Bella’s own account of the events of the book! The film only covers the content of the book, and therein - I think- is the discomfort felt by many audience members.

The story in the book is SUPPOSED to be uncomfortable, creepy, biased by male gaze and lust and patronising sentiment, filled with magic and madness as an attempt to define and explain the life of a woman who is sexual, alternative, political, and strange. In setting up a premise around 2 separate and wholly different accounts of the same events, Gray created a really inspired premise: Poor Things is very openly an exploration of ‘he said, she said’, and how we will judge the weight of stories told by men and women differently, especially stories about women.

The book section- whose contents are encompassed by the film- is SO intriguing, exciting, and lush. As a standalone story, by narrative alone, it is wonderful and as a reader you are really swept into it and believe it- despite a well of subtle discomfort and criticism of their portrayals building up under the surface. When the letter section (supposedly written by Bella) arrives, all of this is suddenly shifted into doubt!

Gray shakes up the entire world he has just created with a straightforward, slightly condescending, far less magical tale of Bella’s own perception of a life plagued by pitiful, abusive, convenient men on her path to freedom, community care, and a political voice. This really challenges you as a reader, and challenges all the previous sections of the book! How much of it is the perspective of Mccandles? Is this how the men in her life saw her? How can it be possible she’s really just a normal, slightly judgey, clever, boring and fallible as the next, real life woman? It really subverts the manic pixie dream girl narrative for me, and not having this in the movie takes away one off the most successful, jarring, powerful critiques of the male gaze I’ve ever seen.

The film is supposed to be from Bella’s perspective. In this adaptation, I choose to take the baby-brain-in-a-woman’s-body story at face value, that is the story he is choosing to tell, though maybe it reduces the impact somewhat. Starting with black and white, wide angle, strong, forced depth of field, and slowly evolving throughout into colour and different shots- I believe the cinematography was designed to reflect the visual processing progression that happens for children. Her pursuit of the sensory and sensual is exactly what I would expect of a baby in a body with adult hormones, maybe this is overly generous. Telling this story from Bella’s perspective, however, is inherently flawed. I believe this is the root of a lot of the creepy vibes people got from the film and what would frustrate Gray endlessly- Bella is never supposed to have seen herself this way.

In many ways, I think the team working on the film struggled with this as well, because they ALSO wanted to tell the story that critiques the male gaze. One of the things I felt during my watching, was a bit of a sense of self disgust. They so masterfully manipulate you into watching with the male gaze, and then holding up the mirror. There are scenes where you can’t help but marvel at how beautiful Emma Stone is, scenes where you as an audience, in step with Mccandles, steal a look at her uncovered chest as she sleeps, scenes where you join Wedderburn in a voyeuristic gaze at her pleasuring herself. These scenes are followed by moments where these men are portrayed starkly as pitiful, personalityless, creeps, stalwart reminders that their gaze is as inappropriate as it is pathetic. As the babes of the Polyester Podcast said (written as I remember it), I don’t think anyone is meant to be going away from this movie thinking ‘I gotta get me a baby woman’, and if they are it seems like a blatant misunderstanding.

Personally, I don't think it is wrong to show vile acts on film. I do think this movie should come with a trigger warning around sexual assault and controlling relationships and ableist exploitation though. When I think about the number of films with terrifying ways of glamourising assault, stalking, and creepy male behaviour, I simply can’t put this movie in that category.
I think there is a lot of value in a film that really honestly delves into the depths of how bad the normalised behaviour of men is, and has a fairly no holds barred approach at showing truly just how pathetic, embarrassing, and laughable it is. (SO many films portray these same behaviours as funny, sexy, and strong, so this is important.)

I loved watching Bella’s journey with sex and pleasure. She has an inability to be kept in check by the men in her life. There is a true joy in seeing a man try to seduce a vulnerable woman, and for her eager sexuality and pleasure to instead break and wear him down beyond repair, leaving her still excited for more and new things. In many ways this is the opposite of a lot of stories we see about women and their bodies and minds.

Something I did find interesting and challenging in the book was wondering whether Gray himself was susceptible to his own gaze, wanted to place him self as a fallible narrator, or couldn’t resist retaining some of the magic. In the supplementary materials at the end of Poor Things he finds additional information and accounts of certain things that do cast Bella’s account of herself into doubt, which I do think takes away a little of the power it had at the end of the letter- but I suppose that’s down to a personal reading and opinion.

Women of Poor Things: Age, Ability, and Women’s Politics

I took the perspective that Lanthimos and Stone were acting in good faith when they designed the character of Bella Baxter, that she is actually a baby at first. But her being a baby doesn’t really remove the disability politics of the movie- disabled people experience infantilisation every day, and the move was VERY uncomfortable in this lense. I am a MASSIVE fan of claiming characters as autistic and adhd representation (as an audhd person myself) and my friends and family can attest that I do this all the time haha, but to be honest I don’t see Bella as an autistic person as some people are suggesting- and in some ways I think that could be a harmful take.

Ok firstly I just took it literally that we know why she behaves unusually- yes many of her behaviours mirror those of people with autism, but she grows and changes! I think for me the framing of her as autistic by some folks I spoke to about this film was really uncomfortable, most of us will not grow out of struggles with incontinence, verbal processing, unusual social behaviours, and sensory seeking or risk taking behaviours, they are simply part of us. I think for those who want to claim her as autistic that’s totally grand if it feels empowering but I thought I’d explain another reason why I didn’t relate to that perspective and prefer the more literal rapidly aging baby premise. Which again adds even more detestable disgust to the male characters who KNOW this, and still choose to be with her! I really think it’s intentional and supposed to be shown as awful! But of course SO hard and triggering for many folks!

That all said, both the film and the book have a distincly weird relationship with disability, especially the use of the r slur in both. But for me a lot more of it came into play with Godwin Baxter, the Dr Frankenstein of the piece. I do feel he fell into a really unhelpful trope of monstrosity defined by facial and physical difference and disability alone.

I do think that some of the movie can be broken down into a discussion of privilege that feeds into disability discourse. Have you heard of 'the ‘Aubrey Plaza Effect’? It’s a bit of a viral theory on tiktok where autistic women talk about desirability politics and how conventionally attractive, rich autistic women are generally allowed to behave however they want and- like many rich, white autistic men- are allowed to unmask in ways you can’t access without being rich, white, or conforming to the beauty standard. It’s just intersectionality and male gaze theory meeting in the way we discuss or applaud autistic women.

I think the Polyester podcast and others were right in asserting that Poor Things was about privilege (though I do think the main theme is the male gaze.) In the film, Bella really is so rich and so desirable to straight, white men. So much of her experience (for better and worse) in the film is controlled by this, and of course its hard not to notice how much of the film would not have happened and how much more cruel her fate would be if she were neither of the above. In the novel it is more overtly about class and politics, and I think the soft nods to that in the film didn’t really live up to that.

The book is in many ways quite loudly a book about birth control, abortion, family planning, and women’s desire- portrayed in a frank and (I think) mostly non-creepy way. In both accounts Bella is horny and queer and open with her desire- even into her old age, sexual liberation and indulgence with proper family planning remains literally central in her politics and career as a doctor teaching working class women about birth control and safe sex. I think the movie loses a little of that, and I have to say it really lost me in its portrayal of older women.

Both older women portrayed in the movie are sexless- overtly so! It is mentioned within 2 mins of meeting the older woman on the boat how sad it is that she hasnt had sex in like 20 years, and the older woman who owns the brothel also attests that people won’t even pay her for sex now. I felt quite let down by this, and I understand maybe it was a decision to talk about layers of privilege or the fleetingness of the power found in men’s attraction(?) but it fell flat for me. I want to see more horny as fuck older women living full lives in cinema okkk???! And I feel like that’s more in the spirit of the book maybe?

Finishing Up (For Now)

Okay lolll this is so so long and I have more in my brain but I can’t reasonably make you read any more, and I STILL haven’t had any real chats with folks who have seen the movie AND read the book so this is all literally first thoughts with next to zero research lollll! Please don’t hate me if anything I said was ignorant, and honestly if you disagree with me on this stuff I will only be more hyped about diving deeper hahaha. Comment, share, rip me to shreds- FEED THE BEAST!

I just finished watching The Favourite and now I am starting to see the threads from Dogtooth through most of the other Lanthimos films through to Poor Things which I ALSO want to write about, but I don’t think it’ll be interesting unless it’s also your current special interest maybe? Someone hire me as a culture critic ASAP- I’ll even edit my work properly ;)

OMG I DIDN’T EVEN TALK ABOUT THE AESTHETICS OF THE FILM- SOME OF MY FAVE *EVER* but there’s no time!! Later maybe.

Love
From
Lydia

Ps omg also I launched a pattern today but it’s not as important as this lol

Hello, it’s me! Rose!

Opening this week’s post with this classic by the magical Todd Rundgren, which coincidently I did at karaoke on Tuesday night. It kiiind of worked as a choice. A little laid-back for a real audience pleaser: 7/10. Extra points for the “it’s important to meeee, that you know you are freee ” part, because…OOF, my heart!

Anyway, onwards to the content you’re here for!

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Pattern News!

The Very Varied Vest launched last week (12th January)! Our first pattern for 2024 and my first pattern as a grader. I could not be happier with it. It’s such a versatile pattern, offering FOUR different views: Round neck, V-neck, split front with buttons and split front with ties (pictured below). The fit, is of course, *chef’s kiss*.

Our written version has this diagonal intarsia colour work. If you’ve never done intarsia before this is perfection. Super simple, and once you master this, the sky’s the limit! Really. As always we want to design patterns that you can trust will fit beautifully, but also encourage you to be creative and take some risks! We’ve been completely blown away by some of the colour work our testers came up with for this pattern. I mean, take a look at the Ravelry Project Gallery.

The Ballistics Bib is being launched as a pattern on Tuesday 30th January. Lydia designed this in collaboration with Qing Fibre, who will be launching a mini-skein bundle (also on the 30th, at 7pm GMT) for the pattern. You can of course make the bib in any colour/s you like, and as part of the pattern Lydia is making embroidery charts so you can any numbers at the bottom and are not tied to a 2023 bib in 2024, or indeed 2025, 2026 and so on…

Last, and by no means least, the Rumble Raglan has been updated and is going to be relaunched in February! Changes include: deepening the neck shaping in smaller sizes, shortening the raglan to prevent bunching and riding up, and adding bust darts across the board. More to follow in later posts, but do keep your ear to the ground for this.

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New Year Resolutions

We’re 19 days into 2024, so I think I can still talk about my intentions for this year. it’s quite simple really… I would like it to be full of dancing and singing. Both doing and watching. (Hence, the karaoke this week). I love singing while knitting and I’d love to develop some dancing/knitting way of working. I bet some of you reading this have done this! For an example of the kind of moves I mean, I can’t get enough of Mats Ek’s choreography for Swan Lake (see below). Like, I love a pointed finger in a dance routine! This is the energy I am bringing forward into 2024.

Short of creating a whole mood board of dance and costume, I think I’ll end my post here. But, I may start dancing, singing and knitting on my socials very soon.

Lots of love,

Rose