Crochet Gloves

On Saturday, I went to Lincoln with a suitcase of some of my favourite pieces from the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection, to show them to the local Guild branch. I shan't write about most of them here, though one that has already had a post to itself is the "Victorious Peace" tea cosy -
an obvious choice as it has the date 1919 worked into the filet crochet, so this is its centenary year.

I also took a few crocheted gloves, which I think are fascinating.  I don't ever want to wear a pair, but they represent the way that women once wanted to look.  Once upon a time, ladies were not properly dressed out of doors without a hat and gloves.  In winter, gloves had an additional function in keeping hands warm, but in summer, they had to be cool and preferably light coloured.  In the 1940s and 50s, patterns appeared for summer gloves crocheted in cotton. We have many of the patterns, and at least a dozen pairs of the gloves, in the collection. 

Here are two pairs I showed on Saturday: a white pair with a very open pattern of ovals on the back of the hand and the fingers, and around the cuffs. 

 And a pale blue pair with a pattern of trefoils around the cuffs, and crochet buttons to fasten them - I think these are delightful.

In a few cases, we have managed to match a pair of gloves to a pattern.  Here's a late 1940s Bestway pattern, and a pair of gloves to the same pattern.

Bestway 2014

My favourite patterns for these gloves show the ideal look that the gloves were intended to complement.  Coats leaflet 298 is an example - it shows a sketch of a lady in a sort of New Look outfit, wearing the gloves that you could make from the pattern.

Coats 298

 
Inside are further sketches of various ladylike activities which would be enhanced by the gloves - drinking champagne, smoking a cigarette (in a holder, of course),....  All with a smartly dressed (no doubt rich and handsome) escort.

And Coats Book No. 405, with several patterns for crochet gloves, sets out what a pair of crochet gloves would offer: "Paris or Penrith, country or town, feminine fancy dictates crochet gloves for summer chic.  The 'finger tip-top' smartness of fashionable gloves in crochet gives that groomed, well dressed, finish to spring suit or summer ensemble.  Elegance, daintiness, delicacy, youthfulness -- take your choice from these inexpensive 'made-to-treasure' gloves."

Coats Book No. 405

They would certainly be inexpensive to make (if you are skilled with a crochet hook, which I'm not).  They are totally impractical for everyday activities, but they could look very pretty with a floaty dress at a summer wedding.  (Again, not for me.) 

If you'd like to try making a pair, and you are a member of the Knitting & Crochet Guild, the Coats booklet is available to download from the Membership area of the Guild website. (And if you're not a member, you could join - membership is open to anyone.)

From Coats Book No. 405

Hand in Glove

Last week, an exhibition of knitted gloves opened at the Bankfield Museum in Halifax.  It's based on the work of my friend Angharad Thomas, who is a fellow volunteer working on the Knitting & Crochet Guild's collection.  For several years now she has been knitting intricately patterned gloves, based on historic Sanquhar and Yorkshire Dales originals  - and has a blog about them, too.

 On Saturday I went with her to the museum, where she gave a talk to introduce the exhibition.  She talked about her designs and sharing them with other knitters, through the blog and patterns published in The Knitter and elsewhere.  And she showed photos of gloves that she has studied in the collections of the V&A Museum (like these 16th century knitted gloves, made for a bishop) and the Glovers' Company (like these beautiful knitted silk gloves from the early 18th century).  She talked too about the Sanquhar and Yorkshire Dales gloves that have directly inspired her own work - some of them in the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection, and now on show at the Bankfield.

I have a pair of Sanquhar gloves myself - you can't not be interested in them if you work with Angharad.  (As I explained here, I didn't knit them, I bought them from the arts centre in Sanquhar.)

Mine are immediately recognisable as Sanquhar gloves, because the range of patterns is quite limited.  (Black and white are a traditional choice of colour, too, though in principle you can choose any colours that you fancy.)  But it's amazing how much variety they have inspired in Angharad's work.  Here's a case of gloves, all in subtle colours, but very different designs - I especially like the ones where the back-of-the-hand part is divided into four sections that then lead on without a break into the fingers.

And here's a more traditional design, based on the Yorkshire Dales shepherd's plaid pattern I think, but with a sneaky red lining to the cuff.
 

Most of Angharad's gloves are hand-knitted, but she has been experimenting with machine knitting recently, and the exhibition has a case of those.

 

The exhibition is open until 14th January, and is well worth a visit for knitters within reach of Halifax.  (The Shared Histories exhibition, at the museum until 7th January, was very interesting, too.)  

My next project, after the scarf I'm working on now, is going to be one of Angharad's patterns.  Not gloves (I've knitted gloves, it's not for me), but fingerless mitts,  The design is called Bonham, and the pattern is on sale on Ravelry, in aid of Knitting & Crochet Guild funds.  I've got the yarn already - I'll keep you posted.  

Sanquhar Gloves

I've just bought a new pair of gloves - for a hand-knitter that wouldn't usually be anything to write about, but these are very special gloves.  They are traditional Sanquhar-pattern gloves, hand-knitted in Sanquhar (in Dumfriesshire in Scotland).    And as you can see, they were knitted just for me, with my initials knitted into panels on the wrist.   

In theory, I could knit gloves like this myself, but actually I don't have the skill, or the patience.  They are in very fine wool (3-ply?) and the detail is just amazing.  (I generally make people look at the gussets between the fingers. Phenomenal.)    

The pattern is very similar to one of the first published patterns for Sanquhar gloves, Patons & Baldwins leaflet 87 that appeared in the 1950s.  

Patons & Baldwins 87

I ordered the gloves from the Sanquhar Arts Cente, A' the Airts, which is just opposite the Tollbooth Museum. We visited both in May 2012,  but I didn't know then that you could order gloves from the Arts Centre.  I think they can be ordered in other colour combinations, and other stitch patterns, but I wanted to stick to the traditional black and white.  The pattern is called 'the Duke' - the squares are supposed to represent the enclosure of the land.  

The gloves are very warm - too warm to wear in the spring-like weather we are having.  But I'll be ready for the next cold spell. 

A New Knitting Group in Huddersfield

On Tuesday evening, we had the inaugural meeting of a new local group of the Knitting & Crochet Guild in Huddersfield.  It has grown out of Tuesday Knit Night - most of the regular attenders are now members of the KCG, so we decided that once a month (first Tuesday), Knit Night will be a KCG meeting and we will have a talk or a workshop, rather than just knit and natter.   Eleven people came along to the first meeting - a good beginning. 

I had volunteered Angharad, in her absence, to talk about the Sanquhar and Yorkshire Dales gloves in the Guild collection, as well as the gloves that she has knitted herself that are inspired by the traditional gloves.   It was really bad timing on my part, because this week she is also running Crochet Week at Lee Mills, but she agreed to do it anyway and did a great job.

All the gloves (both old and new) are knitted in two colours, in small geometric patterns and usually in fine yarns.  They often have a date and the initials of the person they were made for knitted into the cuff.  Angharad usually knits them in 3-ply and has been knitting a series of pairs for friends - they are extremely covetable, so the friends are very lucky.

An array of gloves

You can see better photos of the gloves that Angharad has knitted on her blog, with details of the yarns and techniques.  Below are photos of two of the pairs from the collection that she brought along on Tuesday.  

Yorkshire Dales gloves

Sanquhar gloves

  I am talking at the next meeting (in July) myself, about some of the Aran knits in the Guild collection, though Angharad's talk will be a hard act to follow.

Sanquhar Museum

While we were in Galloway we went to Sanquhar, which is a small village north of Dumfries.  The Tolbooth museum is a typical local museum with a disparate collection of objects from the local area.  What I was particularly interested in, of course, was the display on Sanquhar gloves.  

(Dumfries and Galloway Museums Service have set up a wonderful on-line display of the Sanquhar knitting in their various collections here  - well worth looking at if you are interested in the Sanquhar designs.)

Since I spend so much of my time working on patterns, magazines, and other publications for the Knitting and Crochet Guild, one thing that particularly interested me at the museum was that the Sanquhar patterns were not published until the 1950s, when People's Friend magazine issued two supplements featuring Sanquhar patterns.  One (which we don't have in the Guild collection) was specifically on Sanquhar knitting - details here.  The other was on Scottish knitting in general, but included a scarf pattern that used one of the traditional Sanquhar designs.   People's Friend is published in Scotland  (part of the D C Thomson empire, based in Dundee)  - presumably at that time, the Sanquhar patterns were more or less unknown outside Scotland.


 
The museum also showed a Patons & Baldwins pattern leaflet, likewise from the 1950s, for Sanquhar gloves.  The P&B leaflet and one of the People's Friend supplements have the same model on the front cover (at least it looks that way to me), so I surmise that the production of the leaflet and the supplement were somehow linked, but the museum display did not comment on that.
   

  
So what happened next?  When and how did Sanquhar gloves get more widely known outside Scotland?  How did they get to be so popular in Japan?