Fairy tales have long cast a powerful spell over my imagination, and as an avid childhood reader with an insatiable appetite for any story involving magic, talking animals or little folk of the forest, I feel that I was somewhat destined to one day write this series of books. You are always, however, a collector rather than a writer of fairy tales, and so in my reimagining of these much-loved traditional characters I hope to instil that with some of the very special magic of crochet and retell these well-known stories in my own way. The origin of the six fairy tales in this book are varied, woven together by having at their heart the setting of a cottage that is often, but not exclusively, found within a deep dark wood. They come from the folk traditions of German, Danish and English, and with the exception of Andersen's Thumbelina are regarded as traditional oral rather than literary tales. Of course the most famous of all tales within this collection are the Grimm's stories of Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel and Elves and the Shoemaker. The most important and ever-popular collection of folk tales to be written down, diving into the brother Grimm's Children's and Household Tales was like following a long twisting path of breadcrumbs deep into the forest. The Hansel and Gretel story that I thought I knew very well was in fact just one version of the tale, and the more I read the more I uncovered curious extra details, as well as total omissions of the parts that I often found most intriguing and plot-twisting changes to characters. Throughout their lifetimes and seven editions and reprints of their work, the Grimm brothers themselves rewrote and edited the stories, reshaping them to their modern world to the point where some bear little resemblance to the original oral record.

What I quickly discovered while starting to read more and more versions of the same fairy tales was that if I wished to crochet characters from them, then I would first have to write my own stories. By their very nature fairy tales shift and change with each retelling, and so I realised that before I crocheted a single stitch I would first have to design the fairy tale world for my characters to live in.