Meet the Maker: Julie Arkell

We have another wonderful short film from our Meet the Maker series, in collaboration with film maker Richard Jung, to show you today! Julie Arkell has been a long-time friend of Susan, owner of Loop, and of the shop. She has taught several classes a year for many years, and we also sell her beautiful handmade pieces in our London and online shop. Read on for beautiful insights into Julie’s work!

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Julie has been a friend and collaborator of Loop for many years now. She walked into the shop just around her birthday when we first opened on Cross Street in Islington, and she has been a dear friend both to Susan and the shop ever since. She also designed the window when we first opened in our new location (10 years ago now!)  on Camden Passage in Islington, filling it with her creatures and a knit chandelier.

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We have several classes with Julie every year, where you learn how to sew, knit and embellish outfits for a creature, and you get to spend a whole day with Julie! She has also worked closely with us on the designs for our New York pop-up shops, and our special Edinburgh Yarn Festival tote bags, that we have had for the past two years – designing the tote bags and special NYC logos. Soon there will be a special Loop bag for our 15th anniversary that that she has done a beautiful new drawing for!

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We have carried her work for many years at Loop, and if you’ve ever come to the shop you’ll know we always have several pieces dotted around the shop, or set in pride of place in our large window.

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Julie talks about her work, process and relationship to Loop, as well as her childhood holidays and her love of saints! You’ll get a peek into her amazing studio, and you can see some of her creatures in progress. We hope you enjoy this little look into Julie’s world, and hearing her story.

Watch the wonderful video below!

We really do love Julie and her work, we’re so honoured she took part in our Meet the Maker series! It is so wonderful to see her charm and unique body of work which is full of wistfulness, humour and is sometimes haunting, and always enchanting.

We also have had a few people ask us on Instagram what the pattern for Julie’s beautiful green jumper is. It is called ‘Torhilds Colours’ and is a new Isager pattern that will be a printed pattern soon. We will have it at Loop, and will be making kits up soon! The jumper is knitted in Isager Spinni held with Isager Japansk, making a light airy fabric.

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Really nice news…

We have some fantastic news! Our online shop will be reopening on Friday 1st May! We will be a skeleton crew of just two a day in our building, pulling and packing your orders on different floors. So when May arrives please be patient with us as the post will definitely take longer between our situation, and Royal Mail also greatly slowed down between their own possible lack of staff and the great increase in parcels being sent and delivered these days.

Given that we will be a very small crew for now, we ask that if you have any requests you put them in the notes section on your order rather than emailing the shop afterwards, as this will help with our workload. We also ask that you try, as best you can, not to tweak or change anything in your order once placed by emailing us. Again, there will be just two of us in the shop and we would really love to concentrate on getting as many orders out to people as possible and having to go through bags of packed orders to change something will be very difficult at this time. We really appreciate this. 

More details will follow, but we can’t wait to be sending out lovely parcels to you all again very soon!