An Aran Bobble Hat

In all the mass of material that we have been sorting in the Knitting and Crochet Guild's collections, some items turn up over and over again. The one that I have seen most often, probably, is a Patons pattern book, The Aran Book, published about 1968.  I have seen so many copies of it that I almost believe that every knitter in the country must have had one.

Why did it sell so well?  Most of the patterns are fairly standard Aran jumpers and cardigans.  But when knitting Aran jumpers first became popular, you were supposed to use oiled wool (in the natural white/cream, of course) - the first Aran jumper I knitted was in oiled wool.  And most of the early Aran pattern leaflets were illustrated in black and white - why would you need colour?  So I think this would have been a very attractive booklet. You don't need special oiled wool, you can use Patons Capstan, a regular wool yarn in Aran weight.  And you can knit in red, blue, green - any colour you want.  (I was knitting at the time, and knitting Aran jumpers too, so I ought to know why it appealed to knitters so much, but I don't.)

I know that we had a copy of The Aran Book in my family, because I have a bobble hat that my sister knitted from it (although I don't remember the booklet itself).  I have been wearing the hat at Lee Mills recently when I have been working downstairs in the magazine collection, where it is very cold.

It is definitely the same hat because the Aran motifs match, although it was never as roomy as the one shown in the booklet.

Hat and mittens from The Aran Book

I think it would look better without the bobble on top, but for historical accuracy I shall leave it on.

PS  My sister says that actually the hat was knitted for her by our mother.  She thinks that Mother might have been using up some yarn and that was why she made it a bit smaller than shown - although I'm not sure how.  Maybe it was finer yarn or smaller needles.   She also thinks that there might have been matching mittens as well, but we don't know what happened to them.

Where are they now? - 2KCBWDAY4

 I took part in the first Knitting and Crochet Blog Week last year (in spite of the week coinciding with the cloud of volcanic dust when we were trying to go on holiday).  But this year I have been very slow to get started.  Also the topics for Days 1 and 3 were to do with yarn (comparing yarn, talking about your yarn stash) and I am not as passionate about yarn as many knitters seem to be.  And I'll get round to the topic for Day 2 some time soon, maybe.

Today's topic is a past knitting project, and I'm going to write about  a total failure - a project that was never finished and in fact can't be finished.

Some time before I stopped knitting for 25 years, back in the early 80s, I started work on a Patricia Roberts pattern.  I think it was a cardigan.  The yarn was from her own shop in London - black wool, white and gold mohair, in 4-ply (fingering) weight.  As you can see from the photo, the pattern is wonderfully complicated.  So why didn't I finish it?  One reason is that the design doesn't quite work - at the point where the cables of white and gold mohair approach each other and then diverge, they pull a gap in the background fabric (which is all reverse stocking stitch, by the way).  Maybe that's due to my incompetent knitting, of course.

Another reason is that it's tiny.  I cannot believe that I made the whole back of the cardigan without realising that it was never going to fit - it's only about 14 inches wide.  I assume that I did a tension swatch, but possibly the tension was given over stocking stitch, and the mohair cables pulled the fabric in more than expected.  I don't know.

And another reason why I now can't finish it, even if I felt inclined to start again, is that I can't find the pattern.  It isn't with the piece I have finished, or with the rest of the yarn.  I have several Patricia Roberts knitting books and it's not there. What's more, I can't find it in any of the Patricia Roberts books in the Knitting and Crochet Guild Library.  I think it might have been in a magazine, but I have no idea which one.

So there you are - a totally failed project.

Matchy Matchy

"The Match Game"

One of the early 60s American Vogue Knitting magazines that I bought earlier this year on our Oregon trip included the sweater in the picture. The caption reads: "For separates with real color harmony, you can buy sweater yarn and  matching skirt fabric in a kit by Munrospun."  It reminded me that my sister Margaret bought a Munrospun pack in 1969, or thereabouts.  That should be quite surprising -  Munrospun packs were the sort of thing that my mother's generation aspired to, whereas  M was about 18 and very fashion conscious, and it was the era of the miniskirt.

But she found a Munrospun pack in a sale in Cole Brothers, very cheap, in a beautiful blue, and persuaded Mother to make it up for her.  (Historical note: Cole Brothers is now called John Lewis Sheffield.  This was a few years after it had moved to its present building from Coles Corner, famed in song and story.) 

Instead of a skirt, M wanted a pinafore dress - inspired by this photo.  (Look! A slightly chubby model!)  It was a Vogue dress pattern featured in the Spring/Summer 1969 Vogue Knitting described in an earlier post.

A dress out of a skirt length was quite a tricky proposition.  A Munrospun skirt length was, I think, 45 inches of 54 inch wide fabric (i.e. about 115cm. x 138 cm.) So it was just as well that Mother was a very clever dressmaker and the dress was supposed to be short. She made up a pattern that didn't have very much to do with the original inspiration - it had a yoke, and a zip up the back, and she had to make a seam in the centre front as well.  She made a feature of all the separate pieces with top-stitching.  There was no spare fabric for facings, or even much of a hem.   

   

Mother knit the matching jumper too - I still have the pattern, though it is rather battered. It had the cable up the front (though it didn't show under the pinafore dress) and she added a polo neck.

The result was a very successful outfit,  that M wore a lot.  Unfortunately, the only photo I can find only shows part of it.

   

M in Munrospun

In those days, it was very smart to match all the separate parts of your outfit - an exact match of plain colours, or a plain colour matching one of the colours in a check or tartan fabric, and the Munrospun packs were designed to make it easy.  Now that rule has been relaxed, and I think people are better (or braver) at putting together colours that don't match.  (Though I do tend to work on the principle that black goes with everything, which isn't very sophisticated.)  In fact, too much matching looks wrong now - I saw an elderly woman earlier this year wearing jacket, skirt, blouse, hat, gloves, handbag and shoes all in matching or toning shades of olive green.  She clearly felt very smart, but it looked a bit odd, if not obsessive.  Much too matchy matchy.

Late 60s Knitting

I borrowed The Best of Vogue Knitting Magazine again from my local library this week, and realised that the history of the magazine, in the US and the UK is more complicated than I had thought.  In the US, it first appeared (as the Vogue Knitting Book) in 1932, but then publication stopped in the late 60s, though I can't find out exactly when.  Maybe this explains why the issues that I bought in Cottage Grove in May, dating from the early 60s,  seem so uninspiring - it was a magazine in decline.  It restarted in 1982, and  The Best of Vogue Knitting Magazine  was published to mark its 25th anniversary in 2007. 

What was happening in the UK?  A British version of the Vogue Knitting Book was also published  - the Skiff Vintage Knitting Patterns site  lists several issues from the 50s and 60s, up to issue 68 in Spring/Summer 1966. (At two issues a year, that would also correspond to a first issue in 1932).  But then...  it re-started publication in Spring/Summer 1967 with issue number 1 (again).  It seems that, in this country at least, knitting was still popular enough to warrant a re-launch.   I have two issues of the new series that I bought in 1969  (numbers 7 and 8), but I'm not sure that it survived into the 70s.  The Spring/Summer 1969 issue contains some wonderful patterns,  and consequently my copy is very dog-eared, with the cover in two pieces.

Kaffe Fassett's Moroccan jacket

It is particularly notable for a Kaffe Fassett waistcoat.   I think this was the first knitting pattern that he published.  An article in Let's Knit magazine in March 2008,  reprinted on Kaffe Fassett's web site, says  "I discovered knitting yarns in a mill in Inverness and got a fellow passenger to teach me to knit on the train ride back to London. I put all 20 colours of Shetland yarns I had purchased in the same sweater and took it straight to Vogue Magazine to ask them if they would be interested in featuring it. Reticent English, I wasn't!! That was about 1969 and all the colour in a very landscape Stripe attracted the attention of Judy Brittain the Editor of Vogue Knitting Magazine. She commissioned me to knit a waistcoat in Fair Isle for her next issue."   The waistcoat is knitted in William Fuller's Silver Cloud Shetland wool, though 10 colours rather than 20.


This is also the earliest knitting pattern in a magazine that I have seen which names the designer. Now the practice is almost universal, but not then. The designer is not credited for any of the other patterns in either of the 1969 issues.  I think that naming the designer became more common in the 1970s, when designers like Patricia Roberts were becoming well known.  For instance, the Over 21 Fashion Workshop  magazine, published in 1973, has designs by Bill Gibb, Zandra Rhodes, Patricia Roberts and Susan Duckworth, although several others are anonymous.

I never knitted the Kaffe Fassett waistcost, though it was very tempting.  The fact that it was designed for a man was a bit off-putting.  I did knit one of the designs from that issue. It has lots of  moss stitch ( I still love moss stitch)  - cuffs, waist band and a square neck.  It looked good, but didn't get as much wear as it should have.  I knitted in it nylon yarn  - a mistake - and the neckline was perhaps a bit too high at the front so that the edge rubbed and was uncomfortable.  Pity.  Maybe I should knit it again in better quality yarn.

A lean-look sweater with square neck and moss stitch bands outlining the waist

 (The linen trousers in the photo are from Jaeger - £7.25.  That's inflation for you.)

Revisiting a Past Project

Royal College Aran

The photo is from a "Fashion Workshop" collection of ideas for things to make  published by a long-defunct UK fashion magazine, Over21, in Autumn/Winter 1973.  It included several knitting patterns, including this one, titled Royal College Aran.   The blurb says "Fresh from a design course at the Royal College of Art, Susan Duckworth turned her talents to the traditional and folksy charm of  Aran, slicked up with  a '74 shape and doughboy pockets."

(Susan Duckworth is still a knitwear designer, and has become well-known and successful since her Royal College days, though she has mostly focussed on multicoloured designs using intarsia, it seems.)

I loved the look of this sweater when I first saw it, and how it made Aran stylish. My sister and I both knitted it for ourselves.   

By then I had already knitted myself several jumpers, though I can't remember most of them, and I had  knitted a traditional Aran jumper - they had become very popular round about then for women, I think for the first time.  That first Aran jumper no longer survives - I must have worn it out eventually.  (In my memory, winters were a lot colder then, partly because my parents' house had no heating except in two downstairs rooms. So an Aran jumper got a lot of wear.) 

I still have my Royal College Aran and wear it.  The design looks fresh and current to me, even now (though it seems rather quaint to read that it's a 1974 shape, as if that makes it new and exciting).  I have just packed it away for the summer, but I will add a photo later.

(Much, much later - in fact January 2013.)  I have been wearing the jumper again this week because it has been very cold.  It still looks up-to-date, I think, in spite of being nearly 40 years old.    You can see that I made a couple of changes: I did a twisted rib instead of a plain rib.  I made the cuffs ribbed, too,  instead of stocking stitch, and just had a single turn-back, instead of turning it over twice as shown.  And I continued the honeycomb cable up to the shoulder seams.    It is still very nice to wear.

 
   

Starting out

Today's Knitting and Crochet Blog Week topic is "Starting out":
How and when did you begin knitting/crocheting?

OK.... I learnt to knit in the 1950s, when I was about seven or eight, I think.  I had a doll's dress (or maybe it was my sister's) that was probably crocheted, in a green kind of silky thread, and it had hole in it, and I asked my mother to teach me to knit so that I could mend it.  Of course, I never did manage to mend it by knitting, but instead of explaining that it wouldn't work, she cunningly taught me to knit first.   I think that I made a hat out of a rectangle of garter stitch that was then folded in half and then sewn up down the sides.  I sort of remember that it was red.   The blurry photo shows me wearing a similar hat, though I'm not sure if it was one I knitted.

I don't remember knitting anything much after that until I was a teenager, when my sister and I both started knitting jumpers for ourselves - until then my mother did a lot of knitting for both of us.  In the sixties, knitting started to get exciting,  with designers such as Kaffe Fassett and Susan Duckworth starting out and publishing patterns.  I plan to write about  one of the jumpers we knitted then, later in the week. 

Updating a Classic

I have had a copy of Marion Foale's Classic Knitwear for years (though I think that strictly speaking it is my sister's and I have it on long loan).  It was published in 1985, when I was not knitting, so I have never made any of the jumpers in the book (although I did persuade my mother to knit one for me).   Since I started knitting again, I have had it in mind to knit one of them some time. 


The jumpers and cardigans in the book are quite simple designs, and the stitches are not complicated.  They are all knitted in one colour, too. But they are all, I thought, very wearable - classics, in fact.


However, when I came to look at the patterns in detail, with a serious intention to knit one, I saw that they won't do.  The shapes are wrong for today - they are mostly very loose-fitting, in the body and the sleeves, and they all have dropped shoulders, which makes for bagginess around the armholes. Many of the jumpers have a close fitting rib, followed by an increase in the number of stitches, as well as a change to a larger needle.  That means that the waist is much wider than the hips - nowadays we make jumpers much more close-fitting.     


The jumper I wanted to knit, Badminton, is actually described as "a long slender shape", though to a modern eye it looks very roomy, especially around the waist and armholes. The waist is 6 inches bigger than the waist size it is intended for, and the tops of the sleeves are very wide too. 

But it still is basically a very appealing jumper, I think.  I love the  vertical lines (each is a single stitch in moss stitch (aka seed stitch)), and the square neckline, also in moss stitch.  So I am attempting to knit a slimmer version with set-in sleeves. I am using a straightforward modern pattern for DK yarn, and morphing that into Badminton. 

 The yarn I am using is Wendy Supreme mercerised cotton (DK weight)  - thicker than the yarn originally  intended.   The colour is a sort of blue-green (teal?). I'll report progress later.

Booktown

Last weekend,  John and I went to Glasgow for a wedding.  We stopped on the way at Sedbergh, a little town on the western edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, although nowadays it is in Cumbria.  It is in beautiful countryside and surrounded by hills and has been designated England's Book Town, which was the point of the visit.  (Who chooses England's Book Town?  I've no idea.)

There are several secondhand bookshops in the centre of the old part of the town, which consists of two streets, Main Street and Back Lane, and not much else.  We had been to Sedbergh once before, and I spent most of that visit in the Sleepy Elephant bookshop on Main Street, which has a good selection of knitting books, as well as clothes and other crafts.  Last time, I bought a copy of Kaffe Fassett's Glorious Knitting and a very nice handbag.  They also sell a range of soaps and other toiletries, and there is a strong (pleasant) smell of lemon from that around the knitting bookshelf.

Vogue Knitting 1993

This time, I found several copies of Vogue Knitting magazine, from various dates between 1987 and 2001, priced at £1.50 or £2.50.  Many of the patterns in the earlier issues are BIG jumpers with REALLY BIG dropped shoulders, which would not be wearable without adaptation now.  But even when there are not many enticing designs, there are interesting articles.  For instance, in the Autumn 1993 issue, there is a piece by Elizabeth Zimmermann on the history of i-cord, which I had never heard of before I started knitting again, but seems to appear quite often in knitwear designs these days.  Idiot cord is what we English call French knitting (don't know what the French call it), which we used to make when we were children on a wooden cotton reel with four nails in the top.  Elizabeth Zimmermann  figured out how to knit it on double pointed needles and then developed various ways to use it.  She says that she renamed it i-cord because she thought that the name "idiot cord" was rather rude.

So that was a very successful bookshop visit.  We also went to Westwood Books at the far end of Main Street, which also has a section of knitting books.  More useful still, since it's a very large shop and John spent a long time there, it has coffee and very comfortable sofas.

Dangerous Knitting

My sister and brother-in-law have complained that in describing knitting the Patricia Roberts jumper,  I did not mention another incident that happened when I was knitting while commuting.  So here goes.

With a 70-minute train journey to work, morning and evening, I did a lot of knitting and a lot of reading. If the knitting is not too complicated, I can easily read a novel at the same time, and I used to go to the library frequently and borrow nice well-used hardbacks that would stay open of their own accord while my hands were occupied with knitting, and so the 70 minutes would pass very easily.  One day, I was on the train, busy with my knitting and reading, knitting and reading, when another passenger tapped me on the shoulder and said very slowly and clearly, as if to one probably deaf and certainly daft: "We have to get off the train now - it's on fire".   I looked up and sure enough, there were flames sweeping spectacularly past the window.  The train had stopped and most of the other passengers had already got off and were standing beside the track.  The train  was (I think) a diesel multiple unit, with a diesel engine underneath each carriage, and it was the one underneath the carriage I was in that had caught fire.

The aftermath was not very dramatic - the fire didn't spread, and another train came along shortly to take us on our way.  But I was deeply embarassed.  There must have been a considerable commotion in the carriage - people noticing the flames, pointing them out to each other, calling the guard, the train stopping, an announcement about evacuating the train, people getting off, and I had not noticed any of it.

Must have been a good book.

Cables and Mohair

I said in my first post that one of the things I made before I stopped knitting was a Patricia Roberts design that I still wear.  When I wrote that, I realised that in fact I have not worn it this winter, even though it is a very thick jumper, and this was the coldest January since whenever.  So I went to find it in the clothes-I-am-not currently-wearing trunk in the attic.  The clothes I am not currently wearing are mostly summer clothes at this time of year, but also include clothes that I made myself (e.g. a Clothkits quilted jacket) or keep for sentimental reasons (my daughter's Cub Scout sweatshirt).




 The design is called Cream of the Crop and has thick cables separated by panels of stocking stitch in mohair, using intarsia (and has a matching hat that I didn't knit).  I used the recommended yarn - the cables are in Jaeger Naturgarn, a chunky single-ply wool, and the mohair is also Jaeger.


 




It appeared in a book of Patricia Roberts knitting patterns published in 1975.  Later, she opened a shop in London to sell  her own range of yarns, as well as pattern books and hand knits.  The later pattern books used her own yarn, but in 1975 she was still designing patterns for other companies' yarns. The shop still exists, although it seems that she no longer publishes pattern books.

The main change I made to the design was to twist the cables in opposite directions on the left and right sides. The cables on either side of the v-neck have to somehow absorb the decreases, and I thought that it would look awkward if the two sides of the neck did not match, which would happen if the cables twisted in the same direction.  The structure of the jumper is otherwise very simple, and with straight seams for the shoulders and armholes.

I knitted it at a time when I had a long commute to work, including a 70 minute train journey morning and evening.  You can do a lot of knitting in two hours a day, although this pattern wasn't ideal for a train journey.  The front and back each had 9 balls of yarn in use on every row, and they inevitably got very tangled after a few rows. A train carriage is not the best place to sort out tangled yarn. Even so, I persevered, and I think it turned out very well.  The finished jumper is still very wearable (30 years later) and very warm.  I'm very pleased that I reminded myself to wear it again.

Starting Again

Once upon a time, I did lots of knitting. I did complicated knitting too - several Aran jumpers and some Fair Isle.  One jumper that I still wear is a Patricia Roberts design with cables of thick wool in cream divided by panels of mohair. But then I stopped - didn't have enough time to knit. Until about a year ago I hadn't done any knitting for about 25 years. (My daughter is now 24, so that had something to do with it. I was a bad mother and left all the baby knitting to the grandmas.) I would occasionally think about knitting, and even dream about knitting, so part of me evidently missed it. So when at the end of 2008, it looked like I would be retiring in a few months, I decided to try again. I asked my husband to buy me some yarn for Christmas, and made myself a lacy scarf in double knitting - not too taxing or time-consuming, and immediately wearable. Since then, I have indeed retired, and now I am doing a lot of knitting, especially this winter. This blog is intended to help me organise my thoughts about what I want to knit and why, and how it turns out. Maybe other people might even want to read it?

Here's an example of my past knitting.   I knitted the pullover  for my husband and  he posed in it recently - he doesn't wear it any more, but I am not going to let him throw it out, of course.