Disco Sweaters

One of my favourite blogs is The Knitting Needle and the Damage Done, by Orange Swan.  She reviews knitting magazines, and often exactly nails just what's wrong with a design.  And occasionally she has a post collecting together photos of unusual (aka seriously weird) knitted garments.  Her most recent post is one of those:  Lederhosen and Tutus and Other Knitting Fables.  It included this knitting pattern:

Sirdar leaflet 6065

Her caption is "Penelope had come up with the perfect way to get men to buy her drinks when out clubbing."

It's a super example of 1980s picture knits.  I looked for the leaflet in the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection, and found that it's one of a small group of "Disco" knits.  Here are the others:

Sirdar leaflet 6062

Sirdar leaflet 6063

Sirdar leaflet 6064

You were evidently supposed to wear your Disco sweater with skintight metallic lycra in a bright colour, and BIG hair.  But a long-sleeved sweater in a thick yarn (DK) seems very impractical for a disco - you'd boil.  I can see that one or two of them might also do for everyday sweaters - the giant daisy, and the hearts.  Maybe even the butterfly.  (It was the 80s after all, when picture sweaters were normal wear).    But the lips/straw/glass combo - as Orange Swan says, that's just begging someone to buy you a drink.

Picture This

Last week's Huddersfield KCG branch meeting was a trunk show of picture sweaters.  I took a large suitcase full of picture knits from the Guild's collection, along with bag full of pattern leaflets, books and magazines.   I mostly chose knits I was already familiar with, and several of them have already featured on this blog - the Postman Pat sweater, with its pattern; the Cherry Brandy sweater (sing-along optional);  the Mary Maxim jacket; the Willow Pattern sweater.  Here are some more.

Most of the picture knits and patterns I showed on Thursday were from the 1980s - the heyday of the picture knit.   (Though the Mary Maxim jacket is 1950s.)   Around 1980, sweaters with landscapes on the front were popular - I found several patterns as well as the sweater below.

Sirdar 6109

A lot of elements appear in several similar designs - there's a blue sky with white fluffy clouds, often some hills or mountains in the background, often a few trees (usually conifers); maybe some water, and sometimes a few sheep.  I showed a Hayfield pattern in the same genre here.

I also showed a landscape sweater of a very different kind, by Sandra Inskip.  We have three or four of her Yorkshire scenes sweaters, all knitted in the natural colours of British sheep breeds. I think this one, showing the Ribblehead viaduct is the nicest.

The flower-vase sweater below is a bit later, I suspect - 1990s?  I haven't seen a pattern for it, and I think it might have been knitted from a kit.  (But see my PS below.)

It's worked sideways, and I guess is intended to be done in stranded knitting.  But the knitter has woven in the colour not in use.....

...which gives an uneven texture on the right side.  I think it's quite an attractive effect.

I like it very much - especially the unexpected touches of  bright colour, turquoise and pink.  If anyone recognises the design, I'd love to know.

I finished the show with a couple of seasonal knits.

The polar bear sweater is from a Scheepjeswol kit.  To me the polar bear has a rather odd expression - as though he is grumbling about a mild toothache.  In case you miss the wintry theme, the back reinforces it:

 
And finally, although we don't have any specifically Christmas sweaters in the collection, as far as I know, we do have a very nice one with a robin.

I guess the bobbles are meant to represent snowflakes.  The robin is done in intarsia, and the footprints are in stranded knitting...

-- and continue all across the back.  Isn't that charming?  Again, if you recognise the pattern, please let me know.

 PS Karie Westermann has suggested that the Flower vase sweater might be a Kaffe Fassett design.  And now I've searched though his designs on Ravelry  (should have done that before), I see that it's a design called Brocade.  I thought at first it was only very similar, because the main illustration on Ravelry shows a sweater knitted conventionally, not cuff to cuff.  But most of the Brocade projects on Ravelry are knitted cuff to cuff - so that more or less confirms it.  It's Kaffe Fassett's Brocade.  I would still like to know, though, whether the colourway in the collection sweater was suggested by KF or devised by the knitter.

Willow Pattern and Others

This week, we were sorting more patterns leaflets in the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection - this time a batch of Sirdar patterns from the early 1980s.  Several of them caught my eye, for one reason or another.  The first was a sweater with a Willow Pattern scene on the front - picture sweaters were very popular at the time.  (I love the knitting needles stuck at random into the model's hair, to give an Oriental effect.  Although the big hairpins are a Japanese Geisha thing, and the Willow Pattern is supposedly Chinese, but actually an English invention, according to Wikipedia....  Never mind.)    

Sirdar 6225

I noticed this one particularly, because we have a sweater with the same design in the collection.  The sweater is machine knitted, though it is not a machine knitting pattern.

,    
 And now that we can see the leaflet and the sweater side by side, it's evident that the design has been reflected - presumably that happened in the process of translating it for machine knitting.  (I know nothing about machine knitting, so I don't know how that would be done.)

It's always very gratifying when we match up an item in the collection with a published pattern - it fills in a bit of the history of the item that we didn't previously know.  

Another picture sweater was very noticeable - the design has a tree with sweethearts' names on it. The sweater on the cover has 'Charles' and 'Diana' on it, although the leaflet helpfully says "Adaptable to your own romance".

Sirdar 6226

Part of knitting folklore is that if you knit your boyfriend a sweater, it will lead to a break up.  (See the article about the Sweater Curse in Wikipedia.)  I think that if you knitted yourself a sweater with your boyfriend's name on the front, the relationship would be equally doomed.  However, the sweater might be retrievable - the names are done in Swiss darning, so you could in theory change his name for another one.  Thus leading to an unending series of doomed romances?  Hmmm.

A more traditional design also appears to date from the time of Charles and Diana's marriage -  a Fair Isle style, with some bands imitating traditional patterns, and then one with hearts and initials 'C' and 'D', and another with crowns.  Again, I think you would want to do the initials in Swiss darning, in this case to avoid knitting with three colours in one row and some very long floats across the back of the work, though the leaflet does not suggest that.

Sirdar 6851

And finally, there was a lacy top that I recognised as a re-issue of a design originally published in 1952 - I wrote about the 1952 leaflet here.  It had evidently been a very popular design, and featured in a British Pathe film showing Sirdar designs from 1952.   In the 1970s, it was updated for slightly thicker yarn (4-ply rather than 3-ply) and published as Sirdar leaflet 5193. And the same design reappeared in the early 1980s batch we were sorting this week.    I have never seen any version knitted up, but I imagine it could still work well. 

Sirdar 6036

Sirdar 5193

Mary Maxim

My sister has given me a cutting from the Daily Telegraph of 12th February about twin brothers Mike and Patrick Davies who are still wearing the cardigans that their mother knitted for them in 1959 when they were 15 - you can see the story here from the Daily Mail's online site.

The cardigans are in thick wool with pictorial designs on them; one has a design of yachts and the other has buffalo.  The article says that the wool was Canadian, though bought in Neath in South Wales.   I am sure that they are Mary Maxim designs  - Mary Maxim was (and is) a Canadian yarn company that started in the 1950s.  The company specialised then in hand-knit designs for thick jackets with zip fronts and designs based on Canadian wildlife, sports and similar outdoors-y themes.  They exported the wool and patterns to the U.K. in the late 1950s, and we have around 60 Mary Maxim patterns in the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection.  We don't have either of the patterns for the Davies's cardigans, but we do have an actual cardigan in the "Yachts" design. 

Mary Maxim "Yachts" cardigan

Our example is knitted in black, red and cream rather than cream/fawn mix, dark brown and tan like Patrick Davies'.  Another difference is that our cardigan has set-in sleeves and his has raglan sleeves - Mary Maxim patterns came with instructions for both. 

Yachts cardigan - back detail

  

Mary Maxim patterns of that era are very distinctive - they were all printed on matte card, in a tall narrow format and in a uniform colour scheme.   Two more are shown below, with designs of reindeer and wild duck.  They are quite attractive if you like pictorial knitwear, and they are clearly very hard-wearing, as the Davies brothers' cardigans show. I do have some hand-knits that I am still wearing after 40 years or so - I can't match their (nearly) 55 years yet, though.  

     

Mary Maxim no. 400 Reindeer

Mary Maxim no. 401 Wild Duck

Cherry Brandy Sweater Found

More than a year ago, I found a knitting pattern for a sweater designed to look like a bottle of De Kuyper Cherry Brandy and wrote about it here.  I knew that there should be an actual sweater knitted to that pattern in the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection, because I had seen a photo of it taken several years ago, but it hadn't been seen recently and we didn't know which box it was in.  Then yesterday the cataloguers got to box 39, and found it.

I think it's wonderfully quirky, in a 1980s kind of way, and it's very satisfying to have both the pattern and the sweater (and to know where they both are).  The knitter has adapted the neckline from the original - it should have a stand-up collar with "Extra Fine" in red and gold around it, but this one is a more practical crew-neck instead.

The pattern for the Cherry Brandy Sweater 

If you go back to my original post, you can see the TV ad which featured the model on the pattern.  Be warned - you might find yourself singing the song in your head for the rest of the day.  I am, right now - but I've had "My name is Morgan but it ain't J.P." playing for several days, so I don't mind.

The World is your Sweater

Copley 376

 I found this pattern leaflet recently.  It's dated 1983, when picture sweaters were popular, and  I suppose you could think of it as educational.  You can decide which bit of the world you want on the front - Europe/Africa/Asia, or North and South America.   (Not much good if you live in Australia or New Zealand, though - they don't appear at all.)   Personally, I think it needs a "You are here" sign with an arrow, as well.     

Poppleton's Patterns

Last week, I sorted a box of patterns issued by Richard Poppleton & Sons, a spinning company which had mills at Horbury near Wakefield.   We only have the one box of their patterns - nearly 300 different ones.  (The company no longer exists:  it was taken over by another spinning company, I think in the 1990s when hand-knitting went through a difficult time in the U.K.) 

The oldest pattern that I found was number 824, which also appeared in the earliest Poppleton's ad that I have seen, in Vogue Knitting book in 1949.   

Poppleton 847

 I don't know whether pattern 824 was the first pattern they issued (but why would they start numbering there?) or whether previous patterns had only been circulated locally, and they were trying to become better known by advertising nationally.   It must have seemed a propitious time for spinners:  in 1949, clothes rationing ended in the U.K. 

When I am sorting patterns, I look out for the ones that we have the largest number of copies of - I assume that those patterns are the ones that sold best, and so are the ones that were most attractive to knitters at the time.  One popular Poppleton's pattern is a picture sweater, with a country cottage on the front - the leaflet was advertised in 1981.  

Poppleton 1647

But the most popular of all the Poppleton's patterns seems to be a leaflet from later in the 1980s  (I guess).  It doesn't appeal to me at all as a knitting project - almost all the interest is in the yarn.  But if you wanted quick results (and it was still the 1980s and so you wanted an oversize, loose sweater) you might like it.   

Poppleton 2242

 (In fact, a designer friend tells me that over-size, loose sweaters are coming back into fashion, which seems very bad news to me.  So you might like to keep an eye on Poppleton 2242 for future reference.) 

Poppleton may seem like a jokey sort of name, but it comes from a village near York (or in fact two villages, Upper and Nether Poppleton).  And anyone who reads The Times Higher Educational Supplement (or has read it at any time over the past 30 years) will be familiar with the University of Poppleton:  Laurie Taylor writes a regular column, The Poppletonian,  about events there. 

What to wear on a desert island

I have been sorting more patterns from the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection.  The latest batch are Patons patterns from the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Not an especially exciting batch, to be honest, but I found this bright and cheerful picture sweater from 1981 - evidently meant to be a summer sweater, in spite of being knit in D.K. wool.

Patons 1907 "Summer special" 

I think that Kirsty Young ought to wear a sweater like this for Desert Island Discs, to get her guest in the right mood. (Though as it's a radio programme, we can't see what she's wearing - maybe she already does.)

I also found a companion sweater for the winter. Not as bright, and I think less popular, judging by the fact that I only found one copy of the pattern, whereas there were several of the desert island pattern.  I don't know why they weren't equally popular - I think that if you wanted a wintry picture sweater in 1981, this one is not bad.  And it doesn't have any snowmen, reindeer or other Christmassy elements, so you could have worn it all winter.  Not now, though - I know that there are some picture sweaters around this year, but I don't think that sweaters with a landscape all over the front have been revived.  They still belong in the 1980s.

Patons 1908 "Winter winner"

Blue Peter Sweaters

We were sorting some 1960s and 1970s Patons pattern leaflets at Lee Mills recently and found a pattern for Blue Peter sweaters from 1969 - i.e. children's sweaters with the Blue Peter galleon on the front.  (In case you don't know, Blue Peter is a very long-running BBC children's programme.)

Patons 6150 - Blue Peter Sweaters

 
 A fellow volunteer at Lee Mills borrowed the pattern to show to her grandsons, and they were very keen to have Blue Peter sweaters of their own  - the galleon emblem is still used for the programme, more than 40 years on.  She used the pattern to machine knit sweaters for both of them  - you can see a photo on her blog here.      

 It's not the usual vintage knit that you might find in books like Susan Crawford's  A Stitch in Time, but it's great that 1960s patterns can still appeal to people today.  

Reunited

One of the things we were looking at for the display of picture sweaters at Yorkshire Wool Week was a child's sweater with Postman Pat in his van on the front.  Some of the items in the collection have a pattern with them, or a note of the pattern that was used or who designed it, but not this one.  Then yesterday I was sorting a box of Wendy patterns at Lee Mills, saw the pattern and recognised it.  I found another pattern, too, that was obviously designed to go with it, to knit Postman Pat himself and his black-and-white cat - both patterns were designed by Joy Gammon. 
 

Although it was satisfying to be able to reunite the sweater with its pattern, I am not actually very fond of Postman Pat. We once drove all the way through France, from Boulogne to Provence, with only a cassette tape of Postman Pat stories to entertain our daughter, who was then about four. After a while, we realised that the tape was faulty and had the same two stories on both sides. (It took a while to realise, because all Postman Pat stories sound pretty much the same - people talk about the weather and say "Cheerio!" a lot.)  That sort of thing rots your brain.

The Cherry Brandy Sweater

Before we went to Istanbul, I looked out some picture sweater patterns at Lee Mills for the display at Armley Mills.   I think my favourites (because they are often a bit peculiar, not because I want to wear them) are the patterns that promoted various products.  When picture sweaters were popular, a lot of advertisers seized the opportunity to design their own  - like the Stergene elephant sweater and the British Coal "Only a real coal fire will do" sweater that I wrote about here.  

Sometimes the sweater was only tenuously associated with the product - there is nothing on the elephant sweater to remind you of Stergene or even of washing clothes.  But sometimes, the sweater was essentially an ad for the product - it's a neat trick if you can persuade people to advertise your product for free (and even knit the ad, at their own expense).   Here's another promotional sweater, for De Kuyper Cherry Brandy, designed by Wendy Wools. The design on the front of the sweater is the label from the front of a Cherry Brandy bottle, and the stand-up collar has the words "EXTRA FINE" knitted into it, echoing the label around the shoulder of the bottle.  Essentially the sweater is meant to look like the bottle.  It looks quite opulent, with its rich colour scheme of green, black, red and white with gold lurex.

  

 

According to a magazine cutting that I found with the pattern, it wasn't originally planned that it would be published.  The sweater first appeared in a TV ad (still viewable on YouTube, see below), and the company subsequently were "inundated with enquiries for the pattern".  I wonder how many people actually knitted it and wore it?   It does seem to me a bit odd to want to wear such a blatant ad for an alcoholic drink.  Did the knitters who asked for the pattern think it was a cool design, or were they committed cherry brandy drinkers?   

Yorkshire Wool Week

This week has been Yorkshire Wool Week  at Armley Mills Industrial Museum in Leeds, organised by the Baa Ram Ewe yarn shop.  I went to the closing event today - a class given by Amy Singer of Knitty on designing a lace shawl.  She was teaching what she calls "plug-and-play"  techniques that you can use to turn any rectangular or square lacy stitch pattern into a triangular shawl.  It was a lot of fun, and I now have a test swatch of my chosen lace pattern and a tiny knitted triangle which in time will grow into a much larger knitted triangle, i.e. a shawl. 

We all got enough yarn to make a sizeable shawl.  The original plan was that it should be Titus, a new wool and alpaca yarn developed for Baa Ram Ewe, and reviewed in Knitter's Review  earlier this month.  But the review was so favourable that the shop has run out of Titus, so instead we got 4 balls of  Excellana, a British wool yarn that comes in a range of lovely vintagey colours.  Mine is eau de nil, a very 30s colour (or "Nile Green" as it says on the ball-band, which isn't half so evocative).  And we get the Titus yarn as well, when they get some more in stock.  Lucky us!

At Lee Mills, we had put together a display of some of  the Knitting and Crochet Guild's collections for Yorkshire Wool Week.  Now that the collections are better sorted and recorded, it's possible to choose a theme and find a suitable selection of items.  This one was of picture sweaters (mainly from the 1980s).   When Verity of Baa Ram Ewe came to visit Lee Mills and discuss what should be in the display,  she saw some picture sweaters and thought they were completely charming. ("Bonkers" was the word she actually used.)



I took some photographs of the display before I packed up the sweaters to bring back.  Judging by the reactions of the people at this morning's class,  they created a lot of interest - especially one with a picture of the Ribblehead viaduct, with train.  That was one of four by Sandra Inskip with Yorkshire landscapes in natural grey sheep colours, all beautifully knitted.

Another sweater with salmon (?) leaping up a waterfall and integrated mittens in the shape of a fish's head also attracted a lot of attention (in a "What on earth?!" kind of way).   The mittens are enormous - it must be intended for a large man.  It was paired in the display with a beautifully-made cardigan with a landscape all round the body as well as on the sleeves, involving different textures as well as a whole range of subtle colours.   If picture sweaters are at all acceptable, that one is my favourite.

There were some rather more ordinary landscape sweaters, too, and two wonderful creations with a tiger and a polar bear.   (I'm sure I have seen someone wearing a polar bear sweater recently.  Hopefully, it was in a spirit of irony.) 

      




















 And there was also a panel of children's picture sweaters. If a child is small enough, you can put it into any clothes you like, so these may not be a product of 1980s - more the effect of adults thinking that children in picture sweaters are really cute.

The handiwork in some of these sweaters is admirable.  I still don't think that you should wear a knitted picture of the Ribblehead viaduct across your chest.  Of course, it was different in the 1980s - we didn't have any taste then.  

Oddities

It was a beautiful day today with clear blue skies and sunshine, and it was warm.  I was working at Lee Mills sorting knitting patterns for most of the day, and the store only has north facing windows, so we aren't really aware of what the weather is doing outside - the internal temperature varies over the year between cool and very cold.  But it was warm today enough to sit outside to eat our lunch-time sandwiches - astonishing for March.  The surroundings aren't very beautiful - it's a rough stretch of tarmac with our cars and the skip parked on it, with a backdrop of various large bits of metal that belong to the other businesses on the site.  Even so, it was lovely to enjoy the sun.

Most of the pattern leaflets in the collection were produced by spinners and other companies who published lots of them - it was part of their normal business. But I also have a file of "oddities" - knitting patterns that were produced by companies or organisations that normally had nothing whatever to do with knitting.   Several oddities turned up today.  Three of them are "oddities: subsection soap" and were published by manufacturers of soaps and detergents, to promote use of the product.

INO Knitting Leaflet No 38

Knitting pattern free with Dreft

Stergene Elephant Sweater Knitting Pattern 

I suppose if you want to persuade knitters to use your product to wash their hand knitted garments, it makes sense to offer a free knitting pattern.  It is an idea that has occurred to several manufacturers over a long period.  The INO Flakes pattern dates from the 1930s, and was one of a series - this is no. 38. The Dreft pattern is from the late 1960s, I guess (before decimal currency was introduced in 1971).  The Stergene pattern is more recent, from the era of picture knits.   (Why the elephant?  No idea.)     

The final oddity is just very odd indeed. What's the connection between British Coal and knitting? Was the pattern free with a sack of coal, or what?

The Furry Friends Jumper - Only a Real Coal Fire Will Do