A little sheepish - baby blanket auction for Save the Children

Little baby blanket for Save the children

The troublesome baby blanket is finally completed and the finished article is rather sweet. A little image of Woolly Facade appears in the corner.  The pure Shetland wool in cream and the super soft naturally coloured yarn spun from Cashgora and 30% Manx Loghton rare breed wool are rather special. It's made a lovely cosy little cover up for a small baby - just right for a first size car carrier/seat.

As Christmas is coming up I decided to auction it for charity via EBay. A 100% of the proceeds will be going to Save the Children. The auction is running now and until 11th December Item 290640589687

Knitting at the ready - a little reflection for Poppy Day

I love old books. The other day I was searching the bookcases for a crumbling copy of Winnie the Pooh I knew I had somewhere. But when I opened a rather dusty book I had put my hand on it took me by surprise. Not A.A. Milne but a war time fictionalisation of  real life on a RAF station in World War II entitled Readiness at Dawn by "Blake". I flipped through the black and white photographs peppered through the book - on the last page one paragraph caught my eye.

The year was 1941. It was the early hours of the morning in the operations room....
" The map was empty. The W.A.A.F. with the gasp was reading her poetry again. Two others were knitting service garments, and one a baby's jacket. The men sat and read, or wrote letters or just sat and smoked and did nothing. The hard light beat down on the scene. The telephones were quiet."


The power of a simple task like knitting to calm the nerves, to provide the bare necessities for war heroes and to add to the little tinge of expectation for a new life to come just struck home to me. These days you often come across great nostalgia for the 1940's vintage style but the tragic reality of the era is not one we should forget.

Back to square one with joined up knitting - don't forget to plan your knitting

Baby blanket reverse side

Oh dear! Sometimes its just the basics that trip you up. I have a habit, not a very clever one I know now, of setting off with some random knitting without really knowing what it going to become. This happens most often when we are setting off somewhere in the car and I haven't had chance to organise some knitting to do while in the passenger seat. I often end up just throwing an odd ball of wool and some knitting needles in my bag and start casting on... Something like this happened a few weeks ago.

I had half an idea about making a baby blanket  with little sheep motifs and I some nicely toning shades of cream, brown and grey. But I had already knitted a small mountain of  4" stocking stitch squares before I realised that adding  a 1" border between all the squares was not going to be a very neat idea. And that the grey wool - an early attempt at hand spinning - was far too rough for a baby blanket. So three tone became two tone and half the squares had to be re-knitted.

Joining up the squares remained a problem.  Montese Stanley's Handknitter's Handbook couldn't help me. She devoted a whole chapter to edges and joining emphasising over and again  the particular importance of  formation of the edge stitches on any piece of knitting. I tried several methods of joining with contrast wool but none were really satisfactory. James Norbury's single and wise suggestion was to begin and end each square with 2 rows of garter stitch and begin and end each row in the same way. Making it possible to join with a simple flat seam.

Joined up squares

Some progress has at last been made. I liked the idea of having ridges around the squares on one side and I have finally achieved this by using my linker and my sewing machine. But all those ends to sort out - what a chore and what a time waster!

I will never go down the road with small squares again or set off without a proper plan and preparation. My old Grandma, who knitted all those huge blankets, will be laughing her socks off.

Spare the rod! - first steps in natural dyeing with Golden Rod

Golden Rod dyed wool with the very plants it came from

Its wool week in the UK and I have finally put some time aside to have a go at natural dying. It seems a long time ago now that I first came across Michel Garcia founder of  Couleur Garance*, a botanical garden of dye plants, set in the Chateau de Lauris in Provence. I heard about this magical place via a podcast from the fascinating website of the MAIWA foundation** a Canadian organisation set up in 1997 by MAIWA handprints to help eradicate poverty in rural villages in poorer countries. Sadly I have not been there yet but it inspired me to see what I could do in my own back garden. Its taken me a while but I am pleased as Punch that I tried it out.

Looking round the garden for suitable plants earlier this year I was a bit miffed to find out that the massive yellow plants I had been trying to eradicate for several years was Golden Rod. A perfect plant for dying yellow it's really hard to control once it's on your patch. This years outcrop had to be spared and ideally I had to get it used while the flowers were at their best. I just made it.

I had been looking out for a suitable dye pot for quite a while. Dye pots must be either stainless steel, glass or enamel if you do not want it to affect the finished colour and I wanted it pretty big . I couldn't find anything in my usual haunts for second hand bargains. But a couple of weeks ago a chap round the corner was having a garage sale. He had some lovely antique woodworking tools which were hard to resist and while we were talking I asked if he happened to have any large stainless steel pots he wanted rid of. Next thing he has hopped off to his kitchen and I'm left in charge of the garage sale. He came back with a rather posh steamer complete with inner bowl, strainer and lid. Rather smaller, more complicated and more expensive than my original idea but he turned out to be a right salesman and I left £15 lighter clutching the said pot.

As it turns out the pot with all its extras is ideal. I managed to dye about 4 ozs of wool at a time and it would probably do more.  I decided against throwing the wool in with the flowers and boiled up about 4 or 5 heads for 45 minutes or so before straining. I had forgotten about mordanting the wool so the dye was left outside in tub for a week before I found the mordant kit purchased from George Weil  many months ago. The alum mordant didn't seem too scary, so another 45 minutes of wool simmering ensued before my white Shetland wool finally went into the dye pot for a further 25 minutes.

Getting the wool so hot for so long seemed counter intuitive but luckily I remembered reading that felting is caused by agitation and sudden changes in temperature. So you rinse in hot water first and gradually reduce the temperature of the wool.

I was really chuffed with the results, I was expecting it to be a bit murky but it came out a rich yellow. A second batch in the part exhausted dye pot gave me a lovely primrose.

Next up the onion skins, I have been collecting for a year.

Wooly
*You can get a flavour of the dye garden at  http://www.frenchgardening.com/visitez.html?pid=12016936941558680
**http://www.maiwa.com/foundation/index.html

Come fly with me - butterfly slip stitch

Gate keeper butterfly - photo Peter Morley

We seem to have had a lot more butterflies in the garden this year, maybe its the presence of the runner beans which are knitting their way up the old  aerials, internet and TV cables at the side of the living room window. I had a few early plants in pots, intended for the allotment but other things got the better of me and before I knew it they were completely enmeshed. I put the roots in a big tub they are a bit muddled up but  they are romping away.

Butterfly slip stitch

I have been having a little look at butterfly stitches. There is a  lacy, quite fiddly one, but this really easy butterfly slip stitch pattern is really effective. I came across it in an old (1951) Foyles Handbook by Eunice Close. The stitch pattern for the motif is on the stitch pattern page.

What the Dickens was Madame Defarge really knitting?

Madame Defarge

 Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop behind the counter as he came in. Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his own age, with a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, and great composure of manner. There was a character about Madame Defarge, from which one might have predicated that she did not often make mistakes against herself in any of the reckonings over which she presided. Madame Defarge being sensitive to cold, was wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of bright shawl twined about her head, though not to the concealment of her large ear-rings. Her knitting was before her, but she had laid it down to pick her teeth with a toothpick. Thus engaged, with her right elbow supported by her left hand, Madame Defarge said nothing when her lord came in, but coughed just one grain of cough. This, in combination with the lifting of her darkly defined eyebrows over her toothpick by the breadth of a line, suggested to her husband that he would do well to look round the shop among the customers, for any new customer who had dropped in while he stepped over the way.

Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities

It’s Bastille Day today which has reminded me of the time I took last year to read the Charles Dickens classic, A Tale of Two Cities, having been prompted to do so when I came across a great, 2005, online article “Top 10 men in knitting” by Anne Richards in Knitty .com http://knitty.com/ISSUEsummer05/FEATtopten.html

I wondered if there was any significance in the fact that the two most quoted lines from the book are actually the first sentence, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..” and the last, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done...” But to find out what Dickens actually did have to say about Madame Defarge and the knitting meant going cover to cover squinting along all 58 lines per page of my Victorian copy. Sadly not a first edition but printed just about in his lifetime.

I soon discovered that Madame Defarge was nothing like the little slip of a woman depicted in the line drawing in this early edition, she was a big strapping woman, well fed and well clothed, unlike her customers and wretched neighbours who were close to starving.

Dickens was a wonderful observer but I’m not sure he totally understood the business of knitting. I could be very wrong; but his suggestion that the women knitted useless things merely to take their mind off how hungry they were does not really add up.
"They knitted worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a mechanical substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the jaws and the digestive apparatus; if the bony fingers had been still, the stomachs would have been more famine-pinched."
 If you were next to starving you would not be buying wool to knit to pass the time. More likely, as happened elsewhere, you would be knitting a merchants wool into hose for a pittance. Knitting none stop, day and night, while you walked, and while you talked. Polite knitting in the drawing room did not really happen until Victorian times.

Madame Defarge, however, took great care of her rather better income from the wine shop and room lettings. At one point she claimed to be knitting as a pastime, and later, more pointedly, to be knitting a shroud.  In fact it was always her deadly knitted register of names marked for retribution - come the revolution. But at the end of the day the list “knitted in her own stitches and her own symbols” to be “always as plain to her as the sun” was of limited value once she “the tigress”, had met her comeuppance at the hands of poor little Miss Pross. No one else would be able to interpret it.

A pretty pattern, it was said – I guess it was multicoloured. but knitted in the round or just two pins?

Well it was all a bit more complicated, and metaphorical - but never the less a cracking good yarn!

Hats off! Fair Isle beret meets Tam O'Shanter

With Sheila's admonishments still ringing in my ears I just felt I had to try harder at circular knitting. At the end of  her book a spread of amazing knitted "tammy" hats in fantastic concentric Fair Isle patterns were said to be much easier to make than to describe. That they relied on a double slip stitch decrease was all the information given. I set off to make a small hat for a child and along the way I met some very interesting people.

As I began, I got curious about why these hats are called "Tammies" and  who exactly was Tam O'Shanter? and I finally got round to reading the epic Robert Burns poem. Only half comprehending it, even in translation, I gather he was a bit of a lad for the booze and the ladies who got a bad scare to the detriment of  his horse. His "good blue bonnet" apparently referred to a Kilmarnock bonnet, - heavy duty head gear from which a man would seldom be parted inside or outside.

O dear! by then  I'm totally hooked into finding out more about the mysteries of  these knitted Scottish bonnets.  Historical hats were coming thick and fast from Glengarry's and Atholl's  in regimental dress to berets and forage caps. Fascinating.... you can read more about how they were made at
http://futuremuseum.co.uk/Collection.aspx/bonnet_making/Description

Sally Pointer is also something of an expert when it comes recreating these historical caps and she has some interesting traditional tools too. See  http://www.sallypointer.com/shop/

For this little effort I started off using trusty James Norbury's instructions for beret shaping. So this hat has a tight rim, rather than a rib and is increased out before turning back in for the crown. But then I discovered Ruskin on Ravelry whose splendid Greenvoe pattern explained that knitting a straight tube and then decreasing just within the central crown would do the job. The centre shaping is more Ruskin that Norbury and I completed the job by gentle  washing and drying it to shape over a plate. I decided against a pom pom as this quite a lightweight little hat for maybe a two/three year old. 

As Sheila said in her book making one is a lot easier than it looks or is to describe. I'll try to add an outline of how I made it on the patterns page as soon as I can.

Traditional Knitting by Sheila McGregor and a teeny tiny Fair Isle baby bonnet

Premie size Fair Isle baby hat in yellow and brown

I had a stroke of  luck this week when I came across a book about traditional knitting by Sheila McGregor. I had been on the look out for anything by her since I acquired "Michael Parson's Traditional Knitting" when I was on holiday in Scotland last  year.

If it had been her "Complete Book of Fair Isle Knitting" I would have been over the moon, still I am pretty chuffed to have laid my hands on this 1983 Batsford Paperback - "Traditional Knitting" for just 25p. While only quite a short book Sheila's take on the history of  knitting is well researched and written with some wry humour.

I'm fascinated by the different theories surrounding the development and spread of  knitting techniques and patterns around the globe. There seems to be very little hard and fast evidence and the folklore surrounding "traditional" patterns varies according to where you are asking. Do we owe Fair Isle knitting to the Spanish or the Vikings?  Sheila suggestion is that the source was more likely to have been Estonia.

One thing that stands out from the book for me is the importance of felting. It had never occurred to me that not only hats but most of  those hand knit stockings were felted. The book reminds us that knitting is basically a circular technique and Sheila's parting paragraph says very much about what I think of as "Joined Up Knitting"

"....knitting is in many ways an ideal craft for today. It is no longer true that it has to be economically worthwhile; it is sufficient in itself. The varying levels of skill can explored (if knitters would only lift their eyes from their paper patterns and read a little about the basic). Not the least thing, the end result is useful as well as beautiful and, we would hope, unique."

The are lots of fascinating colour pictures in the book, but here we will have to make do with an image of  my own first attempt at Fair Isle hand knitting last year. I started off at random really, trying out some circular knitting on four pins and some contrasting oddments and just trying to make changes as I went along. It turned out as a very small hat about right for a premie baby, so I sent it off to South Africa with some knitted blankets. squares.
Woolly Facade

Knitted stripes at the double

Childs top in knitted stripes

Two colour knitting in single row stripes can be a pain. The yarn for the next colour change is always at the wrong end of the work! But an easy solution is to use two needles with points at both ends.

I recently inherited some one's lifetime collection of knitting needles containing many double pointers in various lengths so I was able to set about this little dazzler of a child's knitted top inspired by a man's vintage sports shirt I had seen in one of my favourite old books, Modern Knitting.

Jane Koster and Margaret Murray's 1940's book Modern Knitting Illustrated is an other knitting classic published by Odhams Press. The images are just so evocative of the time and a lovely reminder of  how to go about making the most of limited resources. If you ever see a copy; - spot a little lamb tugging a tiny truck laden with wool knitting pins and book on the cover, do not fail to buy it.

I made up this pattern for a four year old, but you could replicate it in any size, taking a standard stocking stitch, round necked jumper as a basic guide. The button opening is started just above the point where the sleeves come in by leaving six or so stitches on a holder and completed one side at a time. I reinforced the button band with cotton tape. The collar is a simple straight band in rib knitted up on the stitches around the neck.

The original man's sports shirt was knitted in two yarns one cotton and the other wool, this one is somewhat similar being knitted in the remainders of indeterminate cones of yarn. The red being quite soft and the yellow a little finer and harder they are quite nicely balanced and dare I say?....it turned out quite nifty but thrifty!

Woolly Facade

Royal Wedding Day Gifts in Swaledale handspun

Voila! The first few skeins of the second helping of my handspun Swaledale, almost ready for knitting into the Achill jacket - it just need winding into balls  before I can take it down to my sister Katharine (aka the Queen of Knitting). Hopefully she has been to busy to knit the first few ounces yet...these look a little better spun.

Despite her title I understand she has not been asked to the Palace on  the occasion of the marriage William and  Kate as the names could be confusing around the table and her title is one of repute rather than noble birth. But this is of no real concern as it has been arranged by her family for her to hold a royal wedding day party at the Croft. Barbecue and burgers, fun and games for forty. I'll take it with me but she will deserve a rest before she starts any knitting of this complexity.

Wooly Facade

Out for a spin

Achill Jacket knitting pattern c.1963

In the early 1960’s we had the Beatles and, shudder my father’s timbers, The Rolling Stones. About the same time I was at Grammar School and old enough to be left with my older siblings while mother and father went on a jaunt touring Ireland with old family friends.

They went as far as Achill Island just off the west coast of County Mayo. Amongst the trophies they brought back were hanks of hand spun wool and a local pattern for an Aran style garment, the “Achill jacket”.

My sister Katharine was volunteered to do the knitting and she produced two wonderful jackets, one in donkey brown for Mum and one in a lovely slate blue for me.  The wool had quite a unique character and the complex arrangement of traditional stitch patterns had such a timeless quality that I wore the jacket for decades. Fashions came and went, but like Mick Jaggar, the Achill jacket just went on and on. I can not remember exactly when I finally gave in and let it go but there was quite a lot of it missing by then; it was worn to destruction.

Sadly there had not been enough wool for Katharine to have a jacket of her own in this yarn, by the time a return trip to Achill came about the hand spinners had gone and the wool could not be found again.

Now my dear sister has offered to make me another jacket, - a labour of love bar none! She still has the pattern and I have spent weeks trying to find a yarn which might have the feel of the original and that could do justice to the work involved - without breaking the bank.

I rather fancied grey as a colour and nearly tried my hand at natural hand dyeing some Shetland yarn I had got hold of, but it would have been a big quantity to do in one go and I hadn’t got any really big pots to do the job. Finally I came to my senses and realised I could have natural grey wool from a grey sheep which I could hand spin myself!

I settled on grey Swaledale and ordered a kilo of combed tops from R E Dickie Ltd. in Halifax. They have great ranges of British fleece and yarns which you can see and buy at http://www.ephraimson.com/redickieltd.php The eagerly awaited parcel has arrived and I’m very, very happy with the contents. All I have to do now is peddle until its done…watch this space.  Anyhow it beats going to the gym.

The longest day – Odd Sox

Odd Sox-Frenchie the stripe

Those who have to put up with me around the home are well aware that on occasions I will appear in odd socks or with my cardigan on inside out. Usually they have sorted me out before I have left the house. But some times it gets worse. I’ll never forget the day I got half way through a morning at work before realising I had odd shoes on my feet. Not wildly dissimilar, they should have been a pair of classic court shoes – plain black slip ons with a small heel. But one was definitely round toed and two years younger than its pointed and well battered companion.

The initial shock horror moment passed without me shrieking out. No, there wasn’t another “pair” in the car or in the staff room. This was it for the day. There was nothing to be done except quake.  Should I let on to my colleagues, or could I avoid open views across the office? If challenged what could I repartee? Worse still, had I already been clocked?  I was supposed to be a professional with letters to put after my name. Would this count in my annual assessment? The longest day ensued.

What brought all this to mind was getting news that one of my knitting bags had been featured on a blog http://thesockgarden.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/knit-club-folksy-friday/

So I was off to the Sockgarden, the home of Odd Sox at a rate of knots. I can honestly say these cute and crazy hand made creatures made by Shaz are absolutely terrific. Do take a look, they are really special.

If I get the chance I’d love to see them in the flesh at Sock! Sat. 26^th and Sun. 27^th March, Loughborough Town Hall. It’s hard to choose… but I think my favourite just now is Frenchie the Stripe and I’d like to be six again. 

Seeing Red - P.S. Knitted pleats for little girls are back again

Slip stitch knitted pleats

Having got quite nostalgic about Grandma's knitting I was a bit miffed to be reminded recently of one less well remembered knitted Christmas present given to me as a child. I think I must have deliberately made the effort to forget the hand knitted jumper initialed on the chest with the letters P.S. due to one of those little Christmas jests that meant no harm but left a little sting. 

Strangely I had remembered the matching skirt which came with it quite fondly. It was worn so long it became too short! Overtime Grandma had knitted little sets for all the Stillman girls with embroidered initials on each. So there was KS, HS, MS and finally PS all kitted out in little knitted pleats and a top to go over.

To understand the impact of opening the Christmas parcel in question you will have to know something of the Christmas Day ritual at Oakfields. The family gathering at our house was huge and included all Grandma and Pam Pams’ children and their children and in later years their children. Now little PS was about five years behind all the others, so at the time I was the baby of the family and the audience packed the room. 

Christmas 1956

It was always a late start. Grandma and Pam Pam refused to leave their home, some miles away, before the Queen's speech at three o'clock. There were so many to cater for; much of the day was taken up with “final” preparations for the giant spread. No presents were opened until after a huge buffet tea of turkey, roast beef, ham, trifles and jellies, mince pies, chocolate log, meringues, éclairs, batten-bergs, other assorted cakes and six gallons of tea had been well and truly consumed. All presents from everyone were piled high around the Christmas tree. The ceremony began when Daddy started to read out the labels on each and every gift and I was dispatched to pass it over. Every present was opened with eager anticipation while we all looked on and cheered the emerging socks and books, bath cubes and handkerchiefs. It went on long into the night.

Then came the parcel containing the said monogrammed knitting.

"Oh! Thank you Grandma" said I,

"Oh!  P.S.! - well she was a little afterthought” said another.

Laughter ensued.

I was not happy and let them all know.

Somehow it didn’t stop there - endearing references to little P.S. taunted me for sometime. No wonder I'm still shy! 

Pleated effect knitted skirt sewn
on to stretch fabric bodice

Never the less, the skirt was a hit, and similar ones were knitted for the next generation too. So it definitely qualifies as a family favourite. I didn’t have a pattern, but with a little help from good old James Norbury, I learnt that the key to the pleating effect is a slip stitch. So after a little experimentation I was able to reproduce it. Big sister (KS) assures me it is pretty close.

It’s remarkably simple to knit and it’s easy to make a skirt for a pre-school little girl in just one piece. You can elasticate the top or if you put on to a little bodice it will never droop. You can find the stitch pattern here and instructions for making a little skirt here.

Knitting hero – James Norbury 1904-1972

James Norbury knitting hero

I’m still looking for a royalty free image of James Norbury, my first knitting hero, until then we will have to make do with my own feeble sketch of the man to whom knitters today owe so much.

I’ve been getting great value from my vintage copy of Odham’s Encyclopedia of Knitting and I have been trying to find out more about James Norbury, his books and to put a face to him. I can understand why so many people speak so highly of him, he just made knitting appear so simple and his knowledge and passion for the craft is contagious.  

To date I have only come across one photograph and when I first saw it I was a little taken aback. I think I was expecting a version of the sort of suave fifties chap you see on vintage knitting patterns. It was not just the bald head and beard rather akin to the Philip Harben, Clement Freud look;  it was the incredibly strong, pebble thick lenses of the glasses he was wearing which struck me most. Taken in 1951 he would have had much of his writing and broadcasting career ahead of him, I wonder if he had damaged his eyes with so much knitting or if he had poor eyesight from early on?

As head designer at Patons, for many years after the World war II he was a highly influential and engaging teacher and spokesman on the subject. Apparently equally at home delivering a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts (1959) or writing knitting books for children.

In the fifties and sixties he was the face of knitting on television. I have been trying to work out why I can not remember him. But now I know he was on the screen as early as 1951 when I would have been a baby in arms.  We did not have a televison at home until 1958 but that should have allowed us to see him on BBC2 in the late1960’s but I don’t recall seeing him.

He must have been quite a striking character. Sir David Attenborough, talked warmly about him in 2009 to Jenni Johnston.

"There is a telling moment when he tells me of one of the few times in his life where he found himself in a job he 'didn't much care for' - the stint he spent as controller of BBC2 in the late 1960s. 

Even here, though, he found things to marvel at. 'The knitting intrigued me,' he says. Knitting? 'Absolutely. There was a chap called James Norbury, who had his own knitting show on the BBC. I sat in on some of the programmes, and good stuff it was, too. I learned lots of racy stuff about "knit one, purl one"."

Mailonline 15th January 2009

I can not wait to get my hands on more of his work. Last time I checked out EBay I had just missed a lovely copy of The Penguin knitting book (1957) by minutes. I know there are about 25 titles out there by him, one or two on embroidery and sewing too, which I will list on a page here as soon as I get time. 

If you want to take a peek at the photo try

http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/JG8198-001/Hulton-Archive

Woolly Facade