Christmas with Janie

​Inside Crochet Magazine recently asked me about my festive traditions and they published a short summary in the most recent magazine. Here is the interview in full for those of you who want to find out a bit more about me and my Christmas!

​Tell us a bit about yourself – where do you live, with family/pets?
 
I live in suburban North London with my husband Andy (who is also my business partner) and our grown-up son Charlie. Our daughter, Summer, left home more than five years ago now. She has a fabulous husband and a puppy who is now coming up to a year old, so we get to have doggy snuggles most weeks!
 
I love living in London and can’t imagine being anywhere else. We are just a seven-minute walk from a tube station, but, as we live on the edge of the green belt, it is quite rural here too, with a cricket pitch and a large country park at the top of our road. We are lucky to be able to go for long walks in the woods, but also pop into the centre of London very quickly and easily, so we feel it is the best of both worlds. 
 
Andy and I have never moved more than about five miles away from where we were brought up and we are very lucky to have our extended family very close by so no one needs to travel too far for Christmas festivities!

Could you tell us a bit about what you do/make, and how long you’ve been crocheting for?
 
I studied textiles to degree level and specialized in machine knitting, later becoming a hand knitter and working as a design consultant, helping people with their hand knit projects, doing demos and teaching workshops. In 2005 I started to get to grips with crochet and really enjoyed the portability and 3D nature of what I could create. I find crochet much more organic in terms of designing compared to hand knitting and love mixing techniques and colours – somehow my brain seems to work better in crochet than it does in knitting.
 
I design items for the home mostly. Blankets, throws, cushions and such like. I also make accessories such as shawls, scarves and bags. I think of my designs as works of art and can only really envisage flat things when I design – a bit like paintings in frames! I cant seem to get my head around designing garments. I have been trying that over the last year or so, but I haven’t been very productive at it yet!  

What inspires your designs, and how would you describe your style?
 
As part of my textiles degree, I studied the History of Art, and I always enjoyed learning about individual artists and movements. My mum was very proactive at taking me to exhibitions when I was younger, so I have always been surrounded by art. When I was doing my degree, we always had to back up our design work with proof of where our ideas came from and this is something I still do today, and I often use the work of artists as the inspiration for my designs.
 
I love surface pattern and tessellations and often look at existing textiles, wallpaper and carpets as inspiration too. I would say my work is quite decorative and I like pretty little touches and clever stitch combinations. I spend a huge amount of time playing with colours – choosing a palette for a project might be my favourite bit.

​How do you like to celebrate Christmas – can you share some of your favourite family traditions? 
 
I really enjoy the lead up to Christmas and all the planning involved in it. We tend to host a few gatherings of friends in the weeks before the big day and always travel into London a couple of times to see the Christmas lights and look in the shop windows. We like to see a show at this time of year too, often choosing a musical or circus (not animals). 
 
We start the food prep a few weeks before the big day. Andy makes a cracking vegetarian wellington from scratch– even the flaky pastry, which can be frozen a few weeks before. 
 
Our Christmas traditions have changed a little now that my children are grown up and Summer doesn’t live at home. Charlie often works on the days either side of Christmas, so we don’t travel and tend to stick close to home. I like to batten down the hatches al little during Christmas week and we get out the board games and jigsaws.
 
We don’t watch TV on Christmas Day and don’t do gift giving until after lunch. We do always watch the Gavin and Stacey Christmas episodes over the holiday period and can often be found quoting Smiffy’s version of ‘Do they Know its Christmas’. Our main aim is being together as a family regardless of what day it is, so we have been known to have our official Christmas celebrations on Christmas Eve or Boxing Day, depending on who is working or needs to be somewhere else on Christmas Day.

What do you most look forward to doing during the festive season?
 
We lead a really busy life with lots of commitments, both work and personal, so Christmas is traditionally a time when we opt out a little and look forward to some serious R&R. (Of course, that tends to mean that we get poorly!)
 
We usually do the food shopping so that we don’t have to touch a supermarket for about ten days other than to nip in for some fresh fruit and vegetables.
 
I love spending time with all the family, but I also really enjoy not having any arrangements and we tend to go for lots of walks and watch movies. I usually cast on a new knit project on Boxing Day or make it my mission to finish some WIPs before the New Year.

​How do you like to decorate your home for the festivities – what’s the look you go for, and has this evolved over the years?
 
I never really have a plan, and I don’t really agree with the whole consumerism side of having a fresh look, with new decorations and themes year after year, so I guess my look is not curated!
 
There is always something that has got broken in the loft in the eleven months between packing the decorations away and getting them out again, so the last few years I have been trying to source things that are more environmentally friendly, such as wooden, tin or felted versions.
 
I also try to source items we can use again. Last year I bought a couple of (real) small trees that sat either side of my mantel piece. They have been out in the garden all summer in new pots and are thriving, so I don’t think they will fit there this year! I tend to cut foliage from the garden and buy a real fir wreath to hang over the fireplace. It all gives off that lovely piney smell and makes up for the fact that we don’t have a real tree. 
 
We have an artificial ‘snow’ covered tree that we have had for about 20 years. It is a little less snowy every year and the house gets covered in white powder when we put it up, but I still love it and think it will probably ‘see us out!’ We have some heirloom baubles and tree decorations that have been passed down a few generations and I still have some that the kids made at school when they were little, so our tree tends to be a real mish mash of things with no real theme. Andy recently referred to it as a tree full of memories, which I think is lovely! 

​I do have a bit of a thing for Christmas bedding. The brushed cotton duvet covers are my favourite and we tend to put them on at the beginning of December, alternating the sets throughout the holidays. 
 
I love seeing the house all twinkly and festive in the lead up to Christmas, but I admit that I take the tree and decs down before New Year if I can. It just doesn’t feel the same when the festivities are over and I like to go into the New Year with everything tidy and sorted. A fresh start I suppose.

​You are well known for your beading, sparkle and rich colourways – can you share some tips for capturing the Jane Crowfoot Christmas look in our own homes this year?
 
Traditional palettes, like green, red and white are not so fashionable anymore and I really like the vintage 50's feel that is popular again. I like a bit of kitsch too and have some lovely old decorations that belonged to Andy’s Grandmother that come out every year. I believe she collected coupons from boxes of Fairy washing powder to save up enough to get them! 
 
I often look for things that would look great in the house in the charity shops in the lead up to Christmas. Last year I found a fabulous candelabra which I decorated with cuttings from the garden and there are always serving platters and festive tableware that can be picked up at little expense. Vintage cut glass vases and bowls, with baubles and fairy lights in, look lovely placed around the house for a quick and easy festive feel.
 
If you fancy making some crochet decorations, then adding beads will give you an instant sparkle. It’s a good idea to add a contrast bead rather than a close match to your yarn as this will create more on an impact. I don’t believe that there are colours that don’t go together – I think it is all a case of quantity and impact. When I am designing, I tend to go with the ‘suck it and see’ method of choosing a colour palette. I sample a yarn shade by adding it in - if I like it, then it stays, if I don’t like it, I rip back and try another. 
 
Cosy crochet blankets look great stacked up ready for those evenings by the TV. Andy and I have our favourites that are always in the living room, but at Christmas time I tend to dig out a few more so that we can all snuggle down and get comfy!

Do you have any Christmas designs and if so, which are your most popular patterns?
 
Handknit Designer Debbie Abrahams and myself run a festive workshop every year in Bournemouth and we both design a project for it. I tend to release these as patterns so there are quite a few now. There are also the designs that I have created for Inside Crochet Magazine over the years – the beaded decorations that featured in a supplement in 2020 and the Glitzy Stocking that I designed last year.

​Tell us a bit about the inspiration behind the patterns you’ve created for Inside Crochet for this Christmas issue?
 
I had the idea of making an artwork with the decorations and decided that I wanted them to create the shape of a Christmas tree, so I worked on shapes and sizes that would all go together and allow me mount them as a cohesive piece as well as looking good on their own. When making the decorations this year I realized that the designs echoed those that I have made previously, which must mean that I have a standard way of doing things and that when it comes to Christmas my brain thinks of flowers and stars! 
 
I really love playing around with beads to get new effects. Making beaded loops and hooking them up later on in the design is so exciting and is a technique I have used in the decorations and the Halley wrap. 

​Do you like to make handmade gifts for friends and family? Which makes have been the most well-received as gifts? Do you have any reliable patterns (of your own, or others) that always work well as a last-minute gift, for example?
 
Every autumn, I think ‘this will be the year that I make some Christmas gifts’ and every year I fail dismally! I think that because creating crochet pieces is my job it means that when it comes to my downtime, crochet is often the last thing I want to do. I also worry about giving a handmade item that isn’t appreciated, but I do know that there are certain people who understand the amount of work that goes into things.
 
I love to cook, so I spend quite a lot of time making tasty things for people – cookies and brownies make great gifts and there are not many people I know who would refuse a home cooked lasagna either, so this might well be the path I will take this year.
 
Last year Andy prepared lots of bulbs to give as gifts. He planted narcissi bulbs in gravel placed in glass jars and timed their growth perfectly so that they burst into flower in time for festive gift giving. I always plant up some hyacinths too as they fill the house with such a lovely smell and add a great pop of colour in the dreary months of the new year.

​What are you hoping to find in your stocking from Father Christmas this year? 
 
It’s a funny thing as you get older – the whole ‘wanting stuff’ goes out the window and you realise that sharing good times with friends and family makes the perfect gift, so I don’t tend to have a list. That said, Andy and I have been discussing getting an infrared sauna! Decadent I know, but Andy has suffered with arthritis since his mid 20s and finds the cold months of winter quite difficult, so the idea of a sauna is very appealing, and they are not as expensive as I first thought. 
 
We live in a bungalow and don’t have spare space, so the sauna would need to go in the summer house where my studio is currently. We would need to do a bit of shifting things around to find a space and maybe our son would need to move out (hint hint), but it would be nice to think that having one might be a reality as we head into 2026.

​If you could make a Christmas wish, what would it be?
 
Of course I have to say that I wish for peace and goodwill across the globe and that winning the lottery wouldn’t go amiss, but I would also like life to slow down a little as it races past the older you get. A couple of extra hours in a day, an extra day in the week and another one added at the weekend would suit me fine – all with not getting any older at the same time please! 

​What are your new year resolutions for 2026 – or just your plans/dreams for things you’d like to do – both in crochet and in life generally? 
 
In 2025 we gave ourselves too much to do and didn’t have enough down time, so for 2026 I am hoping that life will slow down a little. I like to create a vision board as we go into the New Year but always overfill it so this year I am going to be a little more realistic! I would like to create more crochet art pieces. Some one-offs would be great and I like the idea of revisiting some of my Spirit of Flora designs to see how they would work in finer yarns and new palettes.
 
I decided to get physically strong and upped my fitness this year, so I hope to build on that and keep up with the gym sessions. I have found it really helps my concentration and has been a great asset as I get older. Crochet is going from strength to strength too, so seeing more beginners come through and encouraging more people on their crochet journeys would be an amazing thing to do in 2026!