I used to write quite a lot in a previous life, and I missed it. I’ve toyed with the idea of starting a blog for a while, but it is only now that I’m starting to take my hobbies more seriously (crocheting and knitting) that that impulse has turned into action.
The truth is, I spend a lot of time twisting and knotting various fibres into shapes and garments using needles and hooks, and I am slowly turning to translating those ideas into designs and patterns. It feels like a natural progression and a way to reasonably justify my obsession with yarn.
I live in the beautiful Scottish Borders, and I grew up in Zimbabwe. Zimbabweans who move abroad are often referred to as ‘when-wes’ because a lot of their conversation begins with the words ‘when we’: for example, ‘When we lived in Zimbabwe, we would …’, or ‘When we went camping we …’. It speaks of a heart that is filled with nostalgia and always looking back to the land they left.
I started out like that, always yearning for the familiar. But I am lucky in that I have learned that it is entirely possible to love two countries as deeply as each other. Scotland is breathtakingly beautiful, and it would be a massive wrench for me to ever leave here. But so is Zimbabwe, and I travel back every chance I can, experiencing a wrench every time I leave.
At least once a week I wake up thinking I’m in Zimbabwe and that I’m waking up in a pretty single brass bed, in the green and white room I had as a teenager. It takes a second or two for me to reorientate myself and adjust back to my Scottish bedroom, remembering that I live somewhere else now. It’s always a little startling, in that moment, especially to realise that I am not a teenager anymore, but in fact a woman in her mid-fifties who is also a mother of two children. And that the cat trying to drink out of my water glass next to my bed is a tortoiseshell named Cookie, and not a tabby named Lady Jane who slept on my teenage bed every night.
It’s this split identity, and the constant presence of two very different lands in my mind, that informs my design ideas and will most likely inform much of the content of this blog too. And I can promise you that there will be a lot of crocheting and knitting.