Makers Apprentice
Poppy Ruane
Knitwear Apprentice
Grandeys Place, Much Hadham, Hertfordshire
Knitwear Apprentice
Grandeys Place, Much Hadham, Hertfordshire
The next pair of hands - an apprentice learning British knitwear from the cone up.
Poppy Ruane is Genevieve Sweeney’s first apprentice, and on the morning the archive visited she was the quiet engine of the room - head down at a knitting machine, completely absorbed, while the talk went on around her.
She came to the bench by a route that says something about the moment. A film graduate, she went looking for work made with the hands rather than a screen - something, as she told the local paper, that a machine could not simply take over. She had knitted with her grandmother as a child; when she heard, through her dad and then through Instagram, that a British knitwear label near home in Bishop’s Stortford was taking on an apprentice, she applied.
She came through a four-month course and joined the studio, and Genevieve says she picked the craft up remarkably fast - the kind of apprentice a maker hopes for and rarely has to advertise twice for.
What she is learning is the whole trade, not one corner of it. Genevieve teaches in-house: the flat and circular knitting machines, the linking that joins one knitted panel to the next, and the judgement of tension and finish that decides whether a garment is any good. There are accredited courses in London on top of the bench work. It is the old shape of an apprenticeship - learn every part by doing it, beside someone who has done it ten thousand times - fitted to a modern studio.
It matters that this is happening at all. The skills Poppy is taking on are exactly the ones that disappear when a mill closes and no one is trained to replace the people who retire. Genevieve built her in-house studio partly to make room for this: production and training back under one roof, so the knowledge is handed on rather than lost.
This is the archive’s first record of Poppy Ruane, made at Grandeys Place in May 2026, at the very start of her time in the craft. The archive will be glad to follow her: recording the beginning means there is something to measure the rest against. The skill is moving to the next pair of hands - which is the whole point of keeping the record at all.
