ClareAllan celebrates my maternal grandparents. My grandfather was from Clare, a small English village in Suffolk and worked for a tailor in London before he emigrated to New Zealand in 1910. My grandmother was from an early New Zealand family that started Veitch and Allan, a department store in Wellington until the 1930s. The knowledge and wisdom they passed on to me, directly and through my mother and aunts, has been instrumental in my love of sewing and knitting.