We have made no secret of the fact that we love Town End Alpacas’ yarns. A truly, totally English set of yarns in gorgeous natural alpaca colours. Kim sorts and grades the fleeces herself and only the best gets sent off to be spun. Last year we designed for the Alpaca DK, this year we’ve used her Alpaca with Shetland Aran for 3 garments for sli...

We have made no secret of the fact that we love Town End Alpacas’ yarns. A truly, totally English set of yarns in gorgeous natural alpaca colours. Kim sorts and grades the fleeces herself and only the best gets sent off to be spun. Last year we designed for the Alpaca DK, this year we’ve used her Alpaca with Shetland Aran for 3 garments for sli...

We have made no secret of the fact that we love Town End Alpacas’ yarns. A truly, totally English set of yarns in gorgeous natural alpaca colours. Kim sorts and grades the fleeces herself and only the best gets sent off to be spun. Last year we designed for the Alpaca DK, this year we’ve used her Alpaca with Shetland Aran for 3 garments for sli...

The Spottingham Cardi is a bit of a pun on Nottingham. With spots. It made us laugh. (Belinda is from Nottingham.)

A Highland Fling is a Scottish dance. The Highland Bling is our gorgeous, sequinned, cabled sweater that you can dress up or down and make as bling-y as you like.

Still on our skiing theme following Ski Sunday, Aviemore was about the only ski resort there was in Great Britain when we were young (or at least the most famous one anyway). We have never been, but we suspect it’s not quite like Mirabel or Gstaad (not that we’ve been skiing in those, either, although Belinda has been to Gstaad in the summer). ...

Nothing like a Pantomime Dame, of course!

Cambridge Heath Road is very close to where we both live, as is Bethnal Green. So what better names for this year’s festive wreaths than the Cambridge Wreath (the cable-y one) and the Bethnal Green (the stripy one)?

Charterhouse, an ancient public (that means ‘fee-paying and private’ if you’re not in the UK) school, albeit one that has some pretty fancy House Colours and plays footer instead of rugger in the Winter, huzzah, 3 cheers and all that, matron! (Read the astoundingly good and still exceptionally funny ‘Down With Skool’ by Geoffrey Willans and Ron...

As with the Domino hat, we wanted a cowl with colour but without the bother of fairisle or intarsia or ends to darn in. So we came up with something else. It’s fast. It’s cute. It’s different.

We wanted a hat with dots on but we couldn’t be bothered with fairisle or intarsia. We wanted something a bit more textured.

Tamatori. Not one of our usual puns. Tamatori was a pearl diver in Japan, so legend goes. She recovered a pearl that the Dragon God had stolen from her husband’s family and was chased ‘by all the creatures of the sea’ as she made her escape - some woodcuts show her fighting an octopus. She died for her pains as she cut open her breast to hide t...

West 67th. A street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Not our usual Brit-inspired pun. But this is where Belinda has found herself living for a few months, and this is our Rhinebeck sweater as it’s what she wore to visit the New York Sheep and Wool Festival in 2013.

Ski Sunday is the name of the BBC tv Sunday afternoon / early evening skiing programme with a fabulous theme tune, we thought it was merely a fond memory of our childhoods but no, it’s still on! OUR Ski Sunday is a snug and warm sweater inspired by vintage 60s / 70s pictures of skiers with some lovely diamond and triangle patterning, although a...

We didn’t want the crocheters to be left out of the Hallowe’en Wreath fun and silliness, so here is our Cousin Itt inspired crochet monster wreath. Cousin Itt, as you may know, was a charismatic character in The Addams Family and had a similar hair issue, hence Cousin Itt’s Wreath.

Following on from the Hampstead Wreath last year, we thought we’d go a bit spooky-dooky and make Hallowe’en wreaths this year to brighten up doorways / porches / windows…

Tiggywinkle features our perennial favourite, Blackberry Stitch / Bramble Stitch / Trinity Stitch, call it what you will. We will be totally upfront here, this is not the easiest pattern to knit we’ve ever designed, but then again it’s not the hardest requiring a Phd in Pattern Following. Basically beacuse of the increasing / decreasing with th...

A sweater with eyelets and ribbon. Beatrix is quite a girly sweater as photographed but there’s no reason you couldn’t make a quite manly Beatrix for a baby boy if you used a neutral colour and perhaps some grosgrain ribbon in blues and greys. The Beatrix this was named after scandalised her mother throughout her life by not behaving as a Victo...

Squirrel Nutkin was quite a naughty boy, and so this Nutkin is for boys who are hopefully better behaved… Carrying on with the vintage-y feel, there are mock cables (of a sort) and a 50s-esq feel to this little cardi with its striped yoke. We love the look of all these colours together (and the leftovers would make a Jeremy Cap) but you could k...

Jeremy is a Peaked cap, a baby and toddler version of our Sca Fell Peak. In these colours Jeremy is rather masculine, but you could make a lovely girly Jeremy in Ivory with a pink and cream pompom or with a pink (other girly colours are available) bow instead. The Town End Alpaca yarn doesn’t come in non-alpaca colours, but you could probably f...

Jemima is an unashamedly vintage / old fashioned baby Bonnet. Sometimes Jemima looks positively Elizabethan given the chance with a bit of vintage linen and lace. Ideal as a christening bonnet / fancy outfit bonnet or just for everyday if you’re that way inclined. As you can see, Wendy was unstoppable once more with the pompoms.

We just liked the word here - not sure Mrs. Tittlemouse had a blanket…

Leftovers. Not a very glamorous name at all, but designed to use up all the leftover bits and pieces from the Sca Fell Peak, Luton Cloche, Cable Street Collar and Cowley. A stashbuster, if you will.

After naming designs for lots of other places in Great Britain, we’re back in the East End of London proper with Cable Street, the site of a stand off between residents and police to prevent Oswald Mosley’s Fascist Blackshirts marching in 1936 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street. Londoners are justly proud of this event as it ...

Headbanger. No place, the name just amused us. The pattern is called a ‘drunken’ cable as the cables are worked on different rows, so this could also be a headbanger of a hangover headband.

Sweet Pea (green). Yes, this is very green indeed. It makes one of us look positively peaky (Belinda, as green really isn’t her colour). But don’t let the green put you off, it’s still a wonderful cowl.

Newberet. Newbury, famous for racing and Greenham Common. We may be getting to the end of the ‘bury’ puns here… We thought the pics of Eibhlin standing by the gatepost looked vaguely “ ‘allo ‘allo, I shall say zis only once” and very nearly called it Nouveau Beret, but the English pun won over.

A refined, lady-like hat with a bright accent of colour on the Brim and the top of the Crown. Excellent for City wear, teamed with a belted Trench coat. Or floating around your garden on a damp day in Spring, secatuers in hand, clipping flowers and channelling Vita Sackville-West.

A chunky, slouchy, ribby, mini-cable-y hat. Easy. Fast. Being cable-y and ribby it’s very forgiving size-wise, and whilst it’s perfect for the ‘average’ adult female head it would stretch nicely for a male head if knitted in a more sober colour.

A neat peaked cap, reminiscent of vintage cycling caps or old school caps. The peak and band are knitted with the yarn held double to keep the fabric firm and hold the shape, the crown reverts to one end of yarn. No sewing, other than darning ends in! The band is picked up and knitted onto the shaped peak.

Here we go down the rabbit hole into Wonderland - the Cheshire Hat will have you grinning from ear to ear, just like the Cheshire Cat. Neat construction and simple ribbing gives the wearer little cat ears. Cute. Not so cute that a chap couldn’t wear it, though. We’ve had requests…

These forms were leftover from our Hearts of Midlothian Valentine experimentations, so here is a frivol for Mothering Sunday.

Headbands! For people who think hats are just too much…

Going with our track record of bad puns, the Canterberet (’Canterbury’, an old, English city if you didn’t know, nothing to do with horses and cantering but everything to do with the Church, Chaucer and, erm, ‘robust’ literature) is a neat, stylish beret - classical to start off with in garter stitch and then morphing into a ribbed crown that e...

Continuing the puns from Canterberet we have Beret St. Edmunds (Bury St. Edmunds, an ancient English town this time, not a city).

Hard to find ‘collar’ puns.. Collafirth is a very pretty looking place in Shetland. Or should that be on Shetland?

For the cowl and crochet lovers we’ve put our heads together and come up with Cowley. A generous, wrappable cowl in a lovely, slightly different stitch to Collafirth.

Frivolous Valentine fun. We are all for the frivolous here at TBk.

A snug, unisex cowl that’s quick to knit. We can happily say ‘unisex cowl’ as it was pounced upon as soon as it was steamed by one of the Mr. TBk’s and pronounced ‘perfect for cycling to work in’ (this is not a man who normally requests handknits).

A simple ribbed scarf (we won’t pretend it’s fancier), but beautifully proportioned.

’BowBells’. Aka Baubles. Christmas Baubles. BowBells because one of us lives in Bow, and the Bow bells are famous.

Pendleton is a classic sweater for women, but not so classic that it can’t nod to the very current colour-blocking trends in the fashion world. Pendleton looks equally good dressed down with jeans, or smart (as here) with brogues and a skirt. The cable pattern on the yoke is interesting but not particularly hard and the Artesano Aran yarn is be...

With the kind permission of Wendy Baker, Modern Daily Knitting is pleased to offer the Hampstead Wreath as a free download for your holiday merrymaking.

The Simmonds Scarf is a confection of glittery glamour to cheer you through Winter. Let’s face it, you don’t have to be a drag queen to love a sequin. The sequins here are knitted in, which is easier than you might think (if a little fiddly to start with, but then isn’t all knitting fiddly to start with?). Following on from the sequins you have...

A cabled hat that can go girly (with pompoms) or blokey (more of a ski-hat). A quick knit, no sewing (other than darning in ends) and beautifully soft and warm.

Here we give you TBk’s ‘London’ hat, because as any Cockney (or, frankly, most Brits) know, a Titfer is a hat. Tit-for-tat = hat in Cockney rhyming slang.