Spattees and Silk Winders

I bought a copy of the magazine Needlework for All on eBay recently — I'll donate it to the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection after I've written this post.  It's the December 1926 issue (there is no date given in the magazine, but it's clearly a Christmas issue, from the content, and I worked out the year from the information in the British Library catalogue and the other issues that we have in the collection already). 

Needlework for All No. 202, December 1926.  

I bought this issue partly because the eBay listing showed that it includes a pattern for spattees — a garment I have covered in previous posts. 

Spattees in Needlework for All No. 202

There was a brief fashion for spattees (or spats) for women which were launched at an event in the summer of 1926, as I described here and here, so in December 1926 they were still very new and fashionable. The Editor of Needlework for All emphasised this in the introduction to the issue: 

"Needlework for All" is nothing if not up-to-date — a statement which we may safely say is borne out by our current number, with its practical designs for the new Spattees and the fashionable Beret."  

Here's the beret, crocheted, with a tassel:

Beret from Needlework for All no. 202

There was a unexpected bonus for me when the magazine arrived, in an ad for Stratnoid knitting pins, crochet hooks and other needlecraft tools, including Silk Winders. 

As soon as I read the description of Stratnoid Silk Winders, I realised that I have one: "Collapsible. 4½in. long, price 6½d.  Knitting Pin Gauge and Winder combined."  

Stratnoid Silk Winder

And here it is folded up:

Actually, I didn't know until I saw the ad that it was a silk winder.  I bought it as a knitting needle gauge, which it is as well — the holes in the arms measure knitting needles from sizes 5 to 12 (5½mm. to 2¾mm.)  Sheila Williams, in The History of Knitting Pin Gauges describes it as 'a strange propeller-shaped gauge which folds neatly'.  She dates it to 'late 1920s/30s' — I think that probably the 1926 ad in Needlework for All marks its introduction, so 'late 1920s' seems correct.  

Once I thought of it as a silk winder, it is clearly similar to silk winders that we have in the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection, like the three shown below.  One of them still has silk wound onto it — or rather 'art. silk'. i.e. rayon.  

These gadgets were designed to handle rayon, which was very popular for knitting and crochet in the 1920s.  Like other knitting yarns at the time, rayon was sold in hanks. It is a very slippery yarn, and would be unmanageable if you wound the hanks into a ball as you would with wool, so instead it was wound onto something like one of the winders shown here.   You could make your own winder from a piece of stiff card - we have one in the collection cut from a box which originally had something like perfumed soap in it.  It has survived because it still has the rayon wound onto it, otherwise it would have been thrown out long ago.  Winders that were not home-made were generally made of cheap materials: two of those in the photo above are of plywood, and the one with 6 arms is compressed cardboard.  Many of the winders in the KCG collection have the name of a shop printed on them.  The winder above still with rayon on it was from The Grand Pygmalion, Boar Lane, Leeds, a large department store.  The six-armed winder is printed with "Rowntrees of Scarborough - Artificial Silk Specialists".   I suspect that these cheaply-produced winders were given free with a purchase of rayon, though I have no concrete evident of that. The 'Felix Keeps on Knitting' winder is relatively common, and may have been a free gift with a magazine, or something of that sort.

Back to the Stratnoid collapsible winder.  It obviously seemed like an excellent idea to the manufacturers, and the reverse of the winder says that a provisional patent had been taken out, though I haven't been able to find it.   

It doesn't seem to have sold well, though — very few seem to have survived to now, and none of the other Stratnoid ads that I have seen mention it. It is not too surprising that it didn't catch on when you think that at the end of a knitting or crochet project, it is common to have some yarn left over.  Most knitters have a cache of part-used balls of yarn that we keep because we might find a use for it one day. If that happened with an art silk project, you would want to keep the remaining rayon on its winder (and that's why we have winders in the KCG collection that still have silk wound onto them).  That's OK if the winder was free or home-made, and you could easily get another winder for your next project — not so good if it cost you 6½d.  But I am very pleased to have found out more about my Stratnoid needle gauge, and that it was not primarily a gauge at all, but a silk winder.