A knitting enthusiast has had a spike in interest after Tom Daley was spotted at the Tokyo Olympics using her pattern for a woolly dog jumper.
Alice Neal, 50, of Durham, woke up to find hundreds of notifications on her phone from people who wanted to know how they could replicate the diver’s creation.
Daley, 27, was spotted with his needles at the women’s 3m springboard final on Sunday. He later said that his cream, pink and mauve project was for a French bulldog named Izzy, whose Instagram account has a million followers. The design is called Neal’s Juno jumper, named after the Jack Russell for whom she designed it.
Daley, who won his first gold medal a week ago for the men’s synchronised 10m event, wrote on Instagram that it was a “doggy jumper” for a friend. “It is the cutest little pattern to follow by @knittingland. How cute do they all look? I was making another one at the pool yesterday.”
Neal, who took up knitting as respite from the demands of her five sons, knew that Daley had been using her pattern because he had sent her photographs of his previous work with a note of thanks. She had not been certain that his poolside project was another dog jumper in the making until she woke to find her phone “going crazy”.
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“I woke up at six this morning and looked at my phone and thought: what on earth is going on here?” she told The Times. “I suddenly had hundreds more followers and my blog stats were going crazy. I went and looked at his account and discovered that he had tagged me there. I’m gaining followers by the second, which is lovely.”
Followers of her Instagram account Knittingland rose from 1,800 to 3,100 in a few hours.
“He sent me a message a couple of days ago, which was a lovely surprise, with a few pictures of the dog jumpers he’d knitted, so I knew he was knitting them,” Neal added.
Yesterday Daley gave another endorsement when he joined a call for donations to fund a “groundbreaking” trial of a cannabis-based drug to treat an aggressive form of cancer.
The three-year trial is due to begin recruiting 232 patients at 15 hospitals early next year. It will measure whether adding Sativex to chemotherapy extends patients’ lives, delays progression of their disease or improves quality of life.
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Daley promoted the £450,000 fundraising drive with the Brain Tumour Charity after his father, Robert, died aged 40 of a brain tumour in 2011.
Neal said that she recognised Daley’s description of knitting as an activity that helps him cope with the pressure of competing. “When you’re knitting you can’t really concentrate on anything else, so it’s a way of slowing down the brain, anxiety, nerves, all that stuff,” she said, adding: “I’ve got five sons, so it’s absolutely my escape. I can sit down and knit quietly somewhere and say, ‘Not now, I’m knitting, darling.’ ”
It is not the first time Neal’s designs have been on television. “A few years ago [the knitting website] Lovecraft asked me if I would knit some jumpers for Simon Cowell’s dogs for a TV thing that was happening at Christmas,” she said. “They were on a TV show called Text Santa. My phone blew up with people saying: ‘Your jumpers are on TV now!’ It was Simon Cowell with his three little Yorkies and the jumper that I knitted for him. It’s a very strange world, far removed from the one that I live in.”
“I thought that was my 15 minutes of fame and then suddenly Tom Daley is knitting my dog jumpers. I don’t get many hits on my blog because I’ve neglected it terribly. My youngest son is autistic and he’s been at home since Covid hit, so I’ve been very occupied with him for about a year and a half.”
Daley posted his own photograph of a jumper he’d knitted for a friend’s Jack Russell, who was coincidentally also named Juno.
