The Sewing Machines Got Complicated, So Trinity Took Up Knitting

I bought a sewing machine in March 2019. It got complicated in about nine minutes. It is in the loft, with its foot pedal, a manual in four languages and the bobbin I never wound.

At Trinity the staff learned alongside the pupils. “Mr Coma and I have upskilled,” says Mrs Prestney, who now has knitting projects of her own at home. The club meets on Thursday lunchtimes in the art department, open to any year group, no experience needed. Patterns go up on the board, and the projects follow the seasons: Christmas decorations, pom-poms for the community garden, spring flowers, granny squares.

One Junior Year pupil explains the appeal with total clarity. Games comes first, Games is tiring, and knitting afterwards is relaxing. It is the most sensible timetable anyone in my family has ever devised, and its author is about eleven.

The rest of the school has caught it. The head of learning support, an expert crocheter, came in to share tips. The assistant librarian’s mother, a skilled knitter, sat in on a session. At the Open Art Awards, where pupils, staff and families can enter anything they like, the 2025 staff prize went to the head of history for a large appliqué quilt and papier-mâché heads, and the 2026 one to the librarian, Mx Peers, for a rainbow crochet blanket made from scraps, called Waste not (my love).

Our primary school’s staff talent is a woman in the office who once fixed the laminator with a hairgrip.

I have taken up crochet. Week one: a granny square. Week two: a granny square that came out as a trapezium. Week three: yarn for a blanket, which my husband has calculated, at current speed, will be finished when the youngest leaves for university. He has offered to fetch the sewing machine down as a backup. I have asked him not to bring it into this.

Mrs Prestney also recalls a pupil who needed help sewing a button back onto a blazer. “That was a lovely moment.”

On Tuesday our eldest lost a blazer button. I went up to the loft for the machine. By the time I came down with the manual open at the English section, he had sewn it back on himself, by hand, at the kitchen table, in four minutes. Lovely moment. Not mine.