I love Harry Potter — that’s a well-known fact about me, and if you didn’t know that before, you do now!

At uni, I met my dear friend Grumpy*, someone I bonded with quickly on account of (amongst other things) our shared love of the boy wizard. The year after I started knitting in earnest, I decided to have a go at Illusion Knitting. I now knew how to purl, and when I discovered the Harry Potter Illusion pattern by Steve Plummer, it seemed like the perfect summer project.

Illusion Knitting

That particular summer, I was commuting for three hours a day between Leatherhead and London in order to carry out an internship in which I was doing some pretty heavy-duty research into orthopaedics. I spent most of the day reading through pages and pages of scientific papers; and so sleepy mornings and brain-dead evenings on the train were the perfect time to tackle this monstrosity of a project.

Two skeins of the dreaded King Cole yarn made it into the project. I’m proud to say I dropped one stitch, but didn’t get a single line wrong in the pattern. If you’ve ever done one of these, you’ll know that it’s quite difficult to tell if you’ve gone wrong somewhere, and ripping back a line which may have taken an entire train-journey to complete is more than a little soul-destroying.

When I finally finished knitting him, I didn’t know what to do with the giant piece of fabric I had produced. I got creative, and turned it into a wall hanging, mounting it on a piece of bamboo, twisting gold and red strands around each other to make a connecting cord, and making little tassels to go on the bottom.

I presented him to her for Christmas, and I think she was pleased! I certainly was.

Much love,

Corrie xx

* We were studying in The Royal School of Mines — in First Year, a group of seven of us we decided we were all going to be a dwarf from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves“. I challenge you to guess who I am…first person to get it right wins a Plutonium Muffin momento!