The yellow brick road

Finally! the first recreation of an old family favourite is complete just in time for Christmas 2010 and a perfect fit for our youngest grand son, baby George, aged 10 months. This brings the simple brick pattern which my Grandma used to knit for us down through five generations and lives which span across three centuries. This is like the one I was wearing in the 1950's photo on my earlier post “Down by the Sea”.

Looking at it with my sister she was relieved I had been able to complete it with just two yarns remembering how when yarn was in short supply after the second world war, the brick pattern jumpers might be randomly completed in different colours if enough of the original could not be found.

George’s jumper was put together from five strands of machine coned yarn wound together. The exact fibre content is debateable as both colours were remnants from a job lot acquisition.  I don’t think either the brown or the quite lustrous camel is natural fibre but they have combined into a soft but fairly dense fabric, making a nice cosy jumper.

After a few false starts the simple slip stitch pattern was really easy as you only have to carry one colour across at any time and the alternate colour comes up the edge. There are loads of possible variations but if you would like to see how I did this one click the knitting stitch pattern tab to see the stitch pattern I used.

The house that Jack built tea cosy - charity auction for Crisis at Christmas 2010

The house that Jack built

Its just so cold out there! The thought of people having to sleep rough outdoors is really worrying. When the Crisis at Christmas leaflet came through the door, gently floating on a stream of warm centrally heated air it really struck a cord. Crisis can offer a lot more than Christmas dinner to the homeless if they have the funds they can offer a real turning point and direction to a better future too. I thought I would put something together to auction as an EBay.for charity item.

I quite like making tea cosies as a way of using up smaller bits and pieces in applique and patchwork but I have never knitted one. Thinking on a housing theme, memories of those odd "Tudor" cottage patterns you used see in Woolcraft sprang to mind. I'm rather fond of nursery rhymes too... next thing I know  I'm making "The house that Jack built" -  what a lot of characters!

Anyway this turned out be lots of fun. I've had a go at felting or strictly speaking "fulling" a big strip of  loosely knitted Shetland wool into a thick mat  for the walls, I've taken up the warmest seat in our house right between the radiator and my knitting machine to make the roof, got out my fabric paints and done some free embroidery on a sewing machine. I added one of my little designs on leather for the cock that crowed in the morn.

It's up for grabs now, the auction ends Sunday 19th Dec. Item number: 290511734935 Fingers crossed  it will find a new home and the proceeds will help some one out of the miserable cold this Christmas. A perfect present for "the hard to buy for because they already have everything they need"

The damsel all forlorn has perked up no end since she got kissed by the man all tattered and torn!

cheers
Woolley Facade

Joined-up-knitting has a Folksy shop

Baby merino jumper 1-2 years

There's no stemming the flow of little hand knitted garments and baby shawls coming off  my sister Katharine's knitting needles. So now there is a little selection offered for sale in the Joined-up-knitting shop on Folksy. If you are looking for a little present and haven't got time to knit one up yourself you might find one here....

Knitting bag with interlocking knitting pins

I'm adding them as fast as I can but really busy just now getting out knitting bags in time for Christmas too.
cheers
Woolly Facade

Scandinavian Rhapsody

As a first step in the attempt to recreate some of the well loved family woollies of yesteryear I thought I would have a go at a “brick pattern” jumper which was one of Grandma’s favourites. It was a good way of making odd ends of different coloured wools go a bit further.

I’m wearing one of these in the Down by the Sea photo (front row middle). I think it was probably getting a bit on the tight side by the time the photo was taken. But in those days everything had to last a bit longer.

My sister assures me Grandma used slip stitches rather than Fair Isle knitting. By way of a little research I delved into my recently acquired copy of Odhams Encyclopaedia of Knitting by James Norbury and Margaret Agutter (1956) and came across a very short entry for Bohus knitting which makes particular use of slip stitches to build up multi-colour effects.

It looked quite obscure, but I have since learnt Bohus was very significant. having been developed in a small area near Gothenberg, Sweden during the depression in the 1930’s to help provide an income for families when the local quarries they relied upon closed for business.

Led by Emma Jacobsson the work of the Bohus Stickning produced highly prized, couture quality garments in the finest yarns from the late nineteen thirties up until 1969. (This is going to be another great area to explore...more later)

As a warming up exercise I had a go at an example given by Norbury. I was only using miss-matched scraps of  yarn  - so not really representative of the original, very beautiful thing. But…Voila! my first attempt at “Scandinavian Rhapsody”

Down by the sea

Constance and Edmund Kimberley
and grandchildren c.1955-6
me between Grandma and Pam Pam

By the time of my first memories of Grandma and Pam Pam they were already "retired" and spent part of the year looking after their holiday seaside bungalows amongst the grassy fields and dykes at Ingoldmells in Lincolnshire. This was not long after the Great Flood of 1953 which caused havoc all along the east Coast and took the lives of 300 people. (Found some great images and accounts of this event in the Skegness Standard 50th anniversary supplements at http://www2.skegnesstoday.co.uk/sites/floods/floods1.html)

Billy Butlin had already built his holiday camp before the flood, up by the Roman Bank but it was still quite a sedate affair. Not all the roads had too much tarmac then and cockerels called the time of day at the farm next door - before Tommy Bingo arrived.

Probably only a quarter of an acre but with two bungalows, a chalet and caravan let out to holiday makers and another chalet for family accommodation  and the “Waney” shed, it was another world, well heaven actually - when you were five years old.

Electricity ran to the bungalows but all else relied on bottled gas. The soft light from the gas mantles was not dissimilar to the low energy lamps of to-day but they were so much prettier. As for plumbing; the out door Elsan toilets may have had some resemblance to oil drums but were emptied on cue every week into a tanker wagon. Pam Pam wasn’t a smoker but he would carefully leave 2 Woodbine on the lid to reward the men from the council for their trouble. There was a water pump out in the garden but I don’t think it worked, I only remember using water from a tap. Flush toilets did come later.

You could still smell the sea air in those days, it would hit you as you got within a few miles of the coast. The excitement mounted in the back of the car, the only little misgiving was the knowledge that the scary steep downhill turn off the Roman Bank, with the dykes on either side, on to the unmade roads of “Beach Estate” had still to be negotiated. The dykes were big and full of reeds, one came right up to the side of the bungalows, they always fascinated me.

Inside, I remember being taken up too by the imitation stained glass made from some sort of translucent paper that decorated the back door of “Seaholme”. I can still sense the intense aroma of the sunroom at the front. It wasn’t damp but it was “woody”. It had earlier been a verandah. There were two levels but it had been built in and you could take your pick of large Victorian armchairs or just jump up and down on the steps or swing from the wooden pillars.

Much of the furniture was Victorian; the marble topped wash stands in the bedrooms were resplendent with fine pottery toilet sets comprising wash bowl, pitcher and soap dish with a matching “gazunder” parked within.

All this was complemented by two very important features. The hand pegged rugs which decorated every room and took the chill off the lino covered floors and the amazing knitted bed covers which bedecked every single and double bed.
All of these were worked by Grandma and Pam Pam and there were dozens of them.

The bedspreads were knitted by hand on fine needles in a silky yarn. Knitted in large sections, usually in two or three colours, the designs were often based on squares and joined. I have never seen others like them and unfortunately none appear to have survived. It would be good to try and replicate one while there are still some who can remember them well.

While Grandma knitted Pam Pam pegged the rugs from thrumbs. This involved not just pegging but coming up with an attractive workable design from a jumble of loom end threads which had to be cut. This was no “Readicut” man, a sign writer by trade, he was a craftsman. Today these items would command a high price if offered in an arts and crafts market. Then, they were simply a joy and a way of life.

Woolly Facade

Kimberley Connection

Harking back to family knitting memories... so much is owed to my maternal grand parents.

They would have known good times and bad times but I think it was pleasure and a sense of quiet satisfaction as much as necessity which led to their lifelong creativity with wool. Hour upon hour, spanning many decades, spent
usefully yet contentedly and enjoying each others company.

Constance Taylor 1878-1975

Edmund  and Constance Kimberley

This is Grandma, Constance Taylor, a young school teacher at the end of the nineteenth century. Is'nt she splendid? No wonder he fell for her. 


Here they are just after Pam Pam, Edmund Kimberley, returned from the second South African (Boer) War at the turn of the twentieth century.



How close he got to the South African township of Kimberley I don't know. But interestingly this year I came across a knitting charity, KAS - knit a square, based in South Africa  which is persuading knitters all over the world to knit squares for blankets to warm the millions of Aids orphans there. The runaway success of this simple family run project epitomises the power of little things done with love, knitting people together.

Mentioning this charity to a cousin she recalled how Pam Pam had told her about going to war in South Africa. The commanders not aware of the bitter cold nights that are the norm in South Africa stripped all the men of their great coats as soon as they disembarked, thinking they would be warm. Many men needlessly suffered badly and sadly today many, many children suffer too.


Woolly Facade

Would you Adam and Eve It?

How old is knitting?  I have been asking myself. Well who can really say? All I have found out so far is that there's quite a lot of evidence going back a few thousand years of knitting or very similar techniques with charming names such as Sprang and Nalebinding but actual evidence of the origins of knitting are unlikely to emerge, so speculation seems in order.

The suggestion that weaving would have been a  precursor of knitting does not really wash with me. I tend to go with the idea that the simplest fabrics would come first. As an early man surely you would go for some simple tools, for example two sticks, before you got round to thinking of making a frame, stretching fibres, interlacing etc. And maybe before two sticks perhaps just one with  a bent end, like a crochet hook, would have sufficed.

I am going back now - right to the beginning, Adam and Eve after the Fall  finding themselves naked had recourse to fig leaves for apparal. Now one fig leaf (as so often depicted) would still have been very drafty, not to say impossible, without the means to hold it in place necessitating a length of something, maybe a vine or some sort of long plant fibre. This would quickly lead to the need to make some loops and a little hook would have come in handy. After all there are thousands such instruments on any tree. 

To try and prove my point I spent a recent stroll in the woods around Sherwood Forest looking for suitable twigs to make a natural crochet hook. I have one lined up for the job and eventually I will get round to see if I can use it to loop up some vines.

autumn oak leaves

Now I want to make a knitted collar or little cape based on vine leaves or fig leaves. Just now the leaves are falling - I see it as delicate layers of Autumn colours, crisp brown on top of fading and still verdant tresses.

Just a few things to master first - like knitting lace and dip dyeing. I'd better press on.

Woolly Facade

"Listen very carefully, I will say this only once"

A while since my last post, I have been a little preoccupied with some stitches, not in my knitting, but on my face. Not sure what they are made of but they are the sort that have to be taken out by a nurse and they will be gone tomorrow. They will leave a scar but then I have my Woolly Facade now.
The rich germanic accent of the matter of fact Doctor when he told me the BCC (Basal Cell Carcinoma - in case you are wondering) needed to be removed took the edge off the announcement. "We will do it in one day, it will leave a scar, sign here" I had to hold back the chuckles until I got out the door and convinced myself I had not been taken up into an unscreened episode of "Allo allo".

cheers for now

Woolly Facade

First Thoughts

This is me and this is my Woolly Facade.

I have finally given in to the temptation of creating a blog. I hope its going to be fun.

A while ago some spare fabric gave me a great idea for a knitting bag. But I wanted to make a bag that really worked and was not just another bag you could put some knitting in. So I had to do some investigating. The more research I did, the more I saw just fantastic knitting, and a new breed of knitters with a slightly different approach to this age old craft everywhere. Intriguingly knitting is now sometimes about making a statement as much as it is about fashion, leisure or necessity.

All this set me thinking about how a piece of knitting can stir such great memories and how knitting had been a subtle but important factor for generations in our family as in many others. I hope some of these rambles will be about revisiting and recreating old knitting as well as starting new projects and techniques.  I like history and am especially fascinated by how work and industry have affected people in the past so I expect I will blog about that too. It would be great to hear others knitting evoked memories. 



Why "Joined Up Knitting?"

Maybe learning to knit is a bit like learning to write. You learn the alphabet, and you can write some letters,  You get a bit better and you are great at copying and then you get to do "Joined Up Writing."  Before long your handwriting takes on its own unmistakable style, you choose your favorite pens and different colored inks and start putting down your own ideas.

I was taught how to knit when I was quite small - before school I think, but I have only ever taken it up in fits and starts. Maybe knowing too many accomplished knitters I often lost heart or was simply distracted by the next skill I just had to try. Needles and threads were usually to blame, but now I am really trying to go back and start "Joined up Knitting".


So this blog is loosely based around knitting but inevitably it will get joined up with all the other crafty ideas  I can not keep my hands off.


Cheers for now


Woolly Facade