Two 1920 Knitting Patterns

Some time ago, the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection was given two knitting patterns - this is a long-overdue post about them. You might think that it is not worth writing about a donation of two pattern leaflets, when there are more than 50,000 in the collection. But these are special - not so much for their appeal to vintage knitters, but because they are rare survivors. 

One of the patterns is a Beehive recipe card.  

Beehive Recipe Card No. 11

The Beehive Recipe Cards are rare, but not unknown. We now have five of the cards in the KCG collection, and the British Library has a set of 86. (I wrote about the cards here in a previous post.) Like several of the designs on the cards, this one was designed by Marjory Tillotson, who had begun designing knitting and crochet patterns for J. & J. Baldwin & Partners in Halifax before WW1, and continued to work for the company until the early 1920s. The British Library copy of Card No. 11 has a date stamp of December 1921, but comparing it with the one illustrated above shows that it is a later reprint. Unlike the BL copy, ours does not mention that the company had become part of Patons & Baldwins Ltd., and so must date from before the merger in 1920 of the two companies. I am dating it to early 1920, though it could be 1919 - not earlier, I think, or it would have been too out of date to be reprinted in 1921.  

When knitted outerwear for women started to become common around 1910, it was usually in the form of a sports coat. The description of the Phyllida coat points to the raglan sleeves as being "very suitable for sports' wear" - a set-in sleeve might be tighter round the armholes and give less room for movement. I think though that in the 1910s and 1920s, sports coats for women were often worn as casual wear, without any connection to sports. 

The coat is mainly stocking stitch, with the shawl collar, belt and integral button band in garter stitch. There is an odd sentence in the description: "There is extra shaping at the lower edge of each front and back, to prevent the side seam from dropping." And indeed, the fronts and back have short row shaping at the lower edge to make the centre front and centre back longer than the sides. The shaping won't have any effect on the side seams, so I assume that the intention is that if the side seams drop, the shaping will compensate. But any reasonable method of stitching the side seams that I can think would prevent them from stretching, and it's the centre front and back that are more likely to stretch in wear (especially the back), so making them longer will not help at all.  If anyone has any idea why Marjory Tillotson might have added the shaping,  please let me know.

The other pattern given in the same donation is a Sirdar leaflet, for "A Tested and Reliable Jumper". From the style of the jumper it also dates from around 1920. The Sirdar brand still exists, as any UK knitter will know. It was originally the brand name of Harrap Brothers, a company going back to 1880, and the Sirdar name was in use by 1903 when Sirdar Rug Wool was advertised. But I have never seen or heard of any Sirdar leaflets published in the 1920s, so I believe this leaflet is extremely rare. 

Sirdar 'Lady's Knitted Jumper' leaflet

Sirdar wools, including the Sirdar Sports Wool in the leaflet, began to be advertised by 1914, mostly by yarn shops. In 1917 the company published the Sirdar Knitting & Crochet Book, subtitled "A Miscellaneous Collection of Useful Articles". (The KCG doesn't have a copy, but there is one in the British Library.)  The "useful articles" are mostly things like socks, scarves, gloves and mittens; because it was published during World War 1, many of them are intended for men in the armed forces. 

In the 1920s, patterns specifying Sirdar wool sometimes appeared in magazines - that was true for other manufacturers too. As far as I knew (before I saw this pattern leaflet), Sirdar did not publish any knitting patterns themselves in the 1920s. This changed around 1934, when Sirdar started to produce and advertise a numbered series of pattern leaflets. I think that the numbering probably started at 100 or 101 - leaflet 106 is in the Sirdar Heritage Collection. Was the Lady's Knitted Jumper pattern the only Sirdar pattern leaflet published before 1934? If so, why weren't there more? Patons & Baldwins were publishing pattern leaflets at an increasing rate throughout the 1920s, and the two separate companies had produced their first pattern leaflets before WW1. Presumably Sirdar saw no need to - or maybe this leaflet was testing the market, and convinced them that it wasn't worthwhile. It would be nice to know. 

But let's look at this jumper pattern in more detail. The jumper is knitted in one piece, starting at the bottom edge of the front and finishing at the bottom edge of the back, casting on extra stitches at either side for the sleeves, making the neck opening along the way, and casting off the sleeve stitches while working the back. The only seams are at the sides and under the arms. This was a typical construction for jumpers in the 1920s. The collar and cuffs are worked separately and sewn on. It is mostly worked in garter stitch, apart from the deep striped section at the bottom edge, the cuffs and the band around the waist (under the belt) which are all worked in double rib. The main practical problem, it seems to me, is knitting the stitches of both sleeves and the back of the jumper, all at the same time, on straight needles. (It's less of a problem on the front: the neck opening starts before the sleeve stitches are added, so from then on, the two halves of the front are worked separately.) The pattern sort of acknowledges the difficulty - under 'materials required' it lists 3 bone needles, and says, at the point where the two sides of the front are rejoined: "There should now be 248 stitches. (You will need the 3 needles, as there are too many stitches to knit easily on 2 needles.)" The bone needles would have to be double pointed, and you would need 124 on each of two needles and knit with the third. Double pointed bone needles in a 15 inch (38 cm.) length were available, but even so, this seems like a very awkward way to knit and an almost guaranteed way of losing stitches, unless you used some kind of stopper on the ends of the needles to stop the stitches falling off.  

I think that it was published at the same time as the early Beehive Recipe Cards (i.e. around 1920), because the jumper is very similar in style to some of the jumpers in the recipe cards, shown below. 

  

From Beehive Recipe Card No. 3

The Priscilla "jumper sweater" from Card No. 3, is also designed by Marjory Tillotson. Like the Sirdar jumper, it has a deep band of double rib around the waist to pull the garment in without any shaping. 

From Beehive Recipe Card No. 15

The "Suzanne" jumper, again designed by Marjory Tillotson, is described as "a very serviceable garment for school wear". The garter stitch collar and belt, with tassels, match the Sirdar jumper. 

I don't think anyone would want to wear either the Beehive sports coat or the Sirdar knitted jumper now - the shapes don't work well with current styles. Jumpers from the later 1920s, with loose boxy shapes and often with interesting stitch patterns, would be much more wearable. But the designs in the leaflets are nice examples from a time when knitted outerwear had only recently become a regular item of clothing for women. The 'sports coat' evolved into a cardigan, and women have been wearing cardigans and jumpers ever since.   

If anyone would like to see the card and the leaflet in full, copies are free to members of the Knitting & Crochet Guild - email requests to collections@kcguild.org.uk.