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 them with some of the very special magic of crochet and retell these well-known stories in my own way. This book's fairy tales have a very wide range of sources, both historically and geographically. I have brought them together in a collection linked by the anthropomorphised animals within them. Welcome to a fairy tale world where animals talk, stand on their hind legs, don caps and wrap themselves up in scarves to keep themselves warm in the winter. Billy Goats Gruff is a traditional Norwegian oral folk-tale first recorded and published by Asbjørnsen and Moe in 1841. Danish Andersen is credited with the full creation of the tale of the Ugly Duckling, often interpreted as an autobiographical story and first published in 1843. Puss in Boots is of Italian origin and appears in the Grimm's collection, but was made most famous in the French Perrault version published at the close of the seventeenth century.

Gingerbread Boy is American and the most modern, published in 1875, although believed to have origin in other oral stories such as the Giant Turnip and Runaway Pancake. The two most familiar stories to many of us will be the traditional English tales both first published in the 1840s: Goldilocks & the Three Bears and Three Little Pigs. In addition to including animal protagonists, many of the stories in the fables I have selected to include also share the literary rule of three. There are three bears, three goats, three pigs (not to mention their three houses, chairs and bowls!) and the narratives also unfold in sequences of three - the eating of porridge, breaking of a chair and then testing of beds - even the miller at the start of Puss in Boots had three sons. 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.