I am a huge fan of using very gorgeous yarn and smooth bamboo needles in my knitting. Many newbie knitters hesitate to splash out on fancy yarns as they feel their skills are unworthy of the material, but I think this is a false economy: your abilities improve in proportion to how inspired and excited you feel about doing your knitting. If the prospect of knitting involves pleasurable textures and sensations, nurturing imaginative associations and colours which make your toes curl in pleasure, you are likely to pick up your pointy sticks at every available opportunity.

I think that since the kits will need only about 40g of yarn in each, they won’t represent such a massive investment for anyone who’d just like to try out knitting with beautiful yarn. Additionally, the cosy is a fabulous introduction to knitting in the round. Unlike with socks there are no heel-turns or grafting to master; just the process of traveling around your needles. It also knits up fast with the 24sts in the round pattern I’ve come to rely on, which is encouraging in itself.

The question now is how to make both a really user-friendly pattern that is easy to follow, inspiring to knit and which shows off the subtle semi-solid nature of these gorgeous colorways. So I’m currently browsing through Nancy Bush’s Vintage Sock Pattern book and a Stitch Dictionary lent to me by Katie to find exactly the right walking stick cosy application for these fine yarns. For the UK Stitch’n’Bitch day I plan on having some sampler cosies made up with different sections in the beautiful yarn and labels with gauge, stitch pattern, etc. attached.

With Katie’s yarn I like especially that it has been made in a kitchen. Knowing that it has come from plants and saucepans gives an extra imaginative dimension to the yarn for me. It makes me think about plants and soil and earth and bread and firesides and hedgerows and birds and berries and sculleries, and it reminds me of a very rich creative time in my life.

At one point in my life with arthritis I rather ridiculously lived on a shack in the Wicklow mountains in Ireland. Our shack overlooked Dublin and had actual mushrooms on some of the walls. There was no central heating in this place and the wind was so constantly aggressive that everything in my garden grew horizontally. I had a lot of very bad days where I basically huddled by the fire reading and drinking tea, but also good days where I was busy trying to put a stop to GE crops and very actively campaigning about a lot of environmental issues. I worked in a local food Co-Op, teaching kids about organic food and doing face painting. I baked and baked and baked, grew a lot of plants, and read endlessly about herbs and things which might ‘cure’ arthritis.

In between having to be very slow and really having very sub-optimal living conditions, I found the fires and the soups and the letters and the garden all very good and I loved our mountain and all the things living on it. I acquired a drop spindle and a very stinky old fleece which I spun by the fire and then dyed with alum and onion skins with the children at the Food Co-Op. I felt isolated sometimes; it was a solitary life in many ways. My body was always in pain and I didn’t know how to deal with that with other people around, so I preferred my own company.

It was also a time of making home into a rich, imaginary resource full of pleasure and of coming to terms with this arthritic, old-lady body. At the tender age of 20 I felt like an old wise lady, living on a mountain, growing things and making soup. That’s a romantic version of events but in terms of self-image it is the most positive one I have and it has stayed with me through the whole journey of having arthritis. I am secretly proud of my wonky little old-lady fingers; they are a feature, not a defect. They remind me of days when all I managed to do was write a letter to someone and bake a squash.