Sheepish

So I live practically next door to a knitting shop. This isn't something of particular interest to me, as I've only ever once tried to knit anything. I was six years old and my grandma decided to help me knit some white woollen mittens for my brand new baby brother.

By the time he was eleven, and I was seventeen, we decided perhaps it was best to abandon the project. Textiles lessons at school usually involved the teacher shouting at me that, "When I said 'tack it', Laura, I did not mean with Pritt Stick!". When I finally fessed up that I hated textiles, she looked shocked and said to me, "What are you going to do when your husband needs a button sewing on his trousers?" This was 1993, by the way, not 1883. I got into a reasonable amount of trouble for looking her dead in the eye and saying, "Mrs Firth, I'm not going to marry a man."

Anyway, you get the picture. Me and handicraft, not a match made in heaven. So the knitting shop nearby, Prick Your Finger http://www.prickyourfinger.com/, has drawn nothing more than the occasional glance from me. It does however, get an occasional glance because they do knit some weird and funky stuff and put it in the window. In the last few months there has been a life-size knitted toilet and basin, a knitted jar of Marmite and a woolly tin of Heinz Baked Beans.

Often I'll come home at about seven or eight o'clock, and there'll be a group of women sitting on stools around the shop, knitting. Inoffensive, I suppose, if you need a hobby. But the other day, when I came home, there was a woman in the shop signing autographs on a book which appeared to be about knitting. Autographs. On a knitting book? And the shop was absolutely full of people. A tiny little shop on a back street in Bethnal Green hosting an autograph signing event? It has to be a cover-up for something. I suspect Mafia involvement.

Still, I think I've finally found somewhere that might knit me a vagina, as they appear to have the male genitalia quite literally all sewn up.