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