A £5 Aran Cardigan

A bag of mixed knitting patterns arrived at the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection this week, including a copy of a magazine called Knitting & Homecraft.

Knitting & Homecraft magazine, No. 4

We have several issues of Knitting & Homecraft  in the collection, and in fact we already have this one.   It was published monthly, and this was a February issue - but which year?  It's evidently some time in the 1970s, by the styles, but the year isn't given.  It isn't in the British Library catalogue either, which would give some dates.  I've tried looking for clues in the magazine before, but I went through this one again, carefully looking for a mention of the year.  Couldn't find one.   It must be 1971 or later, because the price is decimal (30p), and I think it's early 1970s rather than later.

But looking through the magazine, I was struck by the claim that the Aran cardigan on the cover could then be knitted for 'around £5', which seems astonishing now.  The yarn specified was good quality, too - Blarney Bainin Wool, Irish pure wool specifically intended for Aran knits.    The pattern is headed 'Forever Arans': "These beautiful traditional stitch cardigans will always look right, feel right and be right for wherever you are.  They would be very costly to buy, but these can be made for around £5 from our pattern."    The editorial at the front also makes similar points: "we had in mind those of our readers who like good top fashion garments, yet cannot afford to pay high prices for the ones sometimes seen in the shops....... they are in pure wool, which will last for a very, very long time."   Aran knits were very popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s for hand knitters (though not really 'top fashion', I think). The magazine was quite right about that last point - an Aran cardigan or sweater knitted in the 1970s could very well still be wearable.  (I've got one myself (here), though it's not really a traditional Aran.)

I think the £5 cost reinforces my feeling that the magazine is from the early 1970s, rather than later.  There was huge inflation in the U.K. around 1973-6, and according to the Bank of England's historic inflation calculator, the 2017 equivalent of £5 in 1970 is £73.53,  but £5 in 1976 would only be worth £34.21 now.

My guess for the date of the magazine is 1971 or 1972, but I'd like to know, to catalogue it properly.  I don't think the magazine lasted more than a year, in fact - we have (most of) issues 1 to 12, and I suspect that it folded after that.  The content suggests that they hadn't quite worked out who their readers were.  They included 'Homecraft' in the title, but in fact there is very little that isn't knitting - just three short pieces on tatting, embroidery and gardening.  So anyone looking for cooking, say, as part of the 'Homecraft' would be disappointed.

Another knitting pattern that caught my eye is this dress in random-dyed yarn (Jaeger Spiral Spun).

There are a few other designs for random yarns in the magazine, and they all show similar patterns of stripes in some areas and large patches of one colour in other areas - random yarns were very popular for knitters in the 1970s, and these unpredictable patches of colour were a desirable feature.  (Now, colour pooling is something to be avoided.)  The overdress is machine knitted, and again I wonder if the magazine was judging its readership correctly.  Presumably they thought that including both hand and machine knitting would increase readership, but I suspect that most machine knitters would prefer to buy a machine knitting magazine (there were several being published then).  And if a hand knitter saw this design and liked it, it would be frustrating to find that it was only for machine knitters.   If I'm right that it only lasted for 12 issues, it never attracted readers in sufficient numbers.  And now it is almost completely forgotten, except in archives like the Knitting & Crochet Guild's collection. 

2018 - A Year Of Books

Yesterday, one of my two book groups met for our annual Christmas dinner (at the Catch Seafood restaurant in Holmfirth).  Since 2011, I have made Christmas cards for the other members, showing the books we have read during the year.   They are a nice reminder - it's hard to remember what we read in what year otherwise (especially when you are in more than one book group).

This year's books were:

• The Mask of Dimitrios, Eric Ambler
• A Thousand Paper Birds, Tor Udall
• Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
• A Death in Summer, Benjamin Black
• The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
• The Sealwoman's Gift, Sally Magnusson
• The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West
• Cakes and Ale, Somerset Maugham

Unusually for us, most of this year's books were not new, going back to the Hardy and Turgenev books which are 19th century classics.  I have read several other books by Thomas Hardy, but hadn't read The Mayor of Casterbridge before, and I don't think I have ever read any of the Russian classics.  Fathers and Sons was fascinating, painting a picture of an alien society, with its own strange rules.  Also fascinating to read in an afterword of how it's viewed in modern Russia.

The Return of the Soldier was a surprise hit - I think most of us had never heard of it before.  It was published in 1918, and so was a story about a WW1 soldier published while the war was still in progress.  Although published much later (1930), Cakes and Ale is set around the end of the 19th century, I think, but depicts the same class system, of strict social rules and stifling snobbery.    I read a lot of Somerset Maugham's work at one time, but had never read this one - it was very entertaining.  It's supposed to be about Thomas Hardy and his wives (not very secretly), but I tried to ignore that.

I think the book most of us liked best was The Sealwoman's Gift.  It's a fascinating story based on actual events, of a raid on Iceland in the 17th century to capture a shipload of slaves and take them to North Africa.  Some of them were eventually ransomed and went back to Iceland.  It's a bit hard to understand why the main character chooses to leave her relatively comfortable life in North Africa, where it's easy to be clean and warm, and you can eat dates and oranges, and she can be near her one remaining child, and instead go back to her husband in cold, dark Iceland and eat dried puffins.  Except that in historical fact, she did. 

Our next book, for the January meeting,  is The Collini Case by Ferdinand von Schirach.

The 'Susie' Yarn Holder

I wrote a few months ago (here) about a group of tools and gadgets that had recently been given to the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection. One of the gadgets was an intriguing yarn holder in a leather case.

I have never seen or heard of another yarn holder of this design, but I have now found an ad for it, that appeared in Good Needlework magazine in August 1935.

The ad says:

With "SUSIE" you Knit Quicker — keep the wool clean — you can knit in comfort whilst travelling. The wool follows the needles making tangling impossible.  Post Coupon now for return post delivery, enclosing 8d. P.O. [postal order], or stamps. 

As you can see from the drawing, it has a bangle to go round your wrist, and the V-shaped piece of wire with the two little balls on the ends goes through the middle of the ball of wool - as I had already worked out, more or less.

The fact that I have never seen another like it, nor any other ads, suggests that it didn't catch on.  I had assumed, when I first saw the example in the Guild collection, that it was designed for use with ready-wound wool - it's easy then to push the V of the wire through the hole in the middle.  But in the 1930s, most knitting yarn was sold in skeins, and to use the 'Susie' you would have to wind the yarn around a section of broom handle, or a nostepinne, or something similar, to get the same effect.  (I don't think mechanical wool winders were available then.)  If you were used to winding wool into quite tight spherical balls (which is what I do when I'm winding by hand), it wouldn't be easy.   Or you might think, from the drawing in the ad, that you would have to wind the wool directly onto the yarn holder, which would be very awkward.  I suspect you would only buy one if you saw a demonstration, or on personal recommendation from someone you knew.  If it had been sold through yarn shops and not by mail order, it might have done better.  It's a pity - it's an ingenious design and deserved to succeed.  It might be more successful now, when most commercial yarn is sold ready-wound.

The company that sold it is named in the ad as Tormidor Ltd., with an address at 5 Rampayne Street, London S.W.1.  I can't find out anything about Tormidor - any further information gratefully received.

A Light as Air Scarf

I have just finished a lacy scarf that I started earlier this month - a very quick knit.   The yarn is brushed alpaca and silk, very soft and fluffy, and it's knitted on 6.5mm needles, so it grows fast.

(As in the post I wrote shortly after I started knitting, the photo looks hopelessly out of focus, but it isn't - the yarn is just very very fluffy.) 

The pattern is called Light as Air - designed by my friend Steph as a free pattern for this yarn (see her Etsy shop - Steph's Crafty Bits).  It's a very simple stitch pattern - two rows, and one of them is all purl.  All the decreases are left-leaning, so the fabric is slightly biassed, which is why the ends aren't square, but that doesn't matter in a scarf.  Steph designed it as a shorter narrower scarf, to be threaded through a knitted loop in the same yarn, that would take just one skein.  I've used two skeins, and the scarf is about 28cm. (11 ins.) wide and about 170cm. (67in.) long. It will be very warm and cosy to wear.

Now back to my Rosedale socks - I have finished the first, but I will have to remind myself all over again how to do Judy's Magic Cast On.

October 1942

Two friends who visited recently, and know I like old magazines, brought me a Woman and Home magazine from 1942 - a very welcome gift.  The cover is very worn and coming apart down the spine, but the contents are in much better condition, and a fascinating glimpse of war-time conditions.  Woman and Home was, and still is, a monthly magazine.  It was launched in 1926, and had incorporated Good Needlework magazine from 1940 or 1941.

The cover shows three things that you could make from instructions inside. There is one knitting pattern, for a high-necked ribbed cardigan (also described as a 'button-up jumper') that you could wear on its own or over a blouse.

 Inside, there is an illustration of the tiny V-shaped pocket, which "will hold a small handkerchief to match the blouse". (Only for show and not for use, I hope.)

Clothes rationing had been in force for over a year by that stage of the war, so a cardigan was a useful garment, especially if you could wear it buttoned up and treat it as a jumper.  There is also advice in the magazine on unravelling old knitted garments to re-knit the wool into something else.  And all oddments of wool could be carefully saved - the magazine gave instructions for crocheting collars and necklets, including the African-inspired one shown on the cover, out of rug wool (not rationed, I believe) and brightly-coloured oddments of knitting wool.  There are dress-making features, too - again covering making old garments into new.

It seems that paper for non-essential uses was getting scarcer (although magazines like Woman and Home had not yet been much reduced from their pre-war size) and shops were not providing paper bags for purchases.  (This of course pre-dates by a long way the current concerns over single-use plastic packaging - many things like fruit and veg were sold loose, and only wrapped up in paper or put into a paper bag when you bought them.)   So to deal with this you could make a shopping bag with a wipeable lining to hold everything.

As well as the needlework features, there is quite a lot of fiction - two serials and a complete story.  One of the serials is by Pearl S. Buck, an American novelist who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.  The magazine doesn't mention that, though it does say that she wrote The Good Earth, a novel set in China which is her best known book. The Woman and Home serial is called Answer to Life!, listed as a 1941 novella in a list of her works.  Its main character is a young woman who wants to train as a surgeon, a very difficult thing in those days.  Her mother is a doctor, and apparently the main bread-winner for the family, as her husband has been damaged mentally in some unspecified way by his experience in the previous war.  There are two young men who also appear in the first episode -  I imagined that in future episodes the young woman would fall for the wrong one and then eventually realise that the other is a better choice.  But I was completely wrong - after some digging around, I found an article about the novella here.  She does marry the wrong man, and the marriage breaks down, and having given up her training to marry and have children, she goes back to her ambition to be a surgeon.  Not the usual women's magazine romance at all.

I'm fascinated by the ads in the magazine, too.  There are a few that advertise knitting wools, and two of those feature pattern leaflets - like the pattern in the magazine, they are for high-necked cardigans.

Both the Golden Eagle and Femina ads stress 'coupon economy'  - I think this refers to the fact that your clothing coupons went further if you knitted your clothes instead of buying them ready-made.  But apart from rationing, knitting wool was hard to find even if you had the coupons to spare, as the Femina ad says: "Intensified war production means a shortage of many things, including Femina wools — but they are always worth waiting for."

The Copley's ad goes even further in acknowledging that wool was scarce: it has one of a series of "Couplets of Knitwise Notions",

Cut out the front, crop waist and sleeves, of winter-time's thick sweater;
bind firmly — this bolero makes your best frock even better.

(Though I can't help thinking that you would be sorry next winter when you didn't have your thick sweater any more.)

But it does go on to say that you might be lucky and be able to buy some new Copley's wool: "You're a good knitter (and a good sort) if you put Comforts first, put brains into "remakes," and put wrapping paper in your shopping bag —  ready for some "Excelsior" or some other Copley line and a Copley leaflet when your woolshop has a supply."

There are ads for some products that are still around - Weetabix, Bovril, Knight's Castile soap.  And Ryvita, which surprised me - I thought it was a much later import from Sweden.

But as I discovered here, it was imported from Sweden long before the war (from 1925) and was made in Britain from 1936.

There were a couple of public information notices, too, one from the Ministry of Food, encouraging women to collect wild produce from the countryside - elderberries, crab apples, rowan berries, rose hips, haws, mushrooms and blackberries.  I was a bit surprised that the section on mushrooms does not give any advice on identifying safe fungi, or warn that some fungi are deadly.  Perhaps people were more aware in those days - but then you'd think that  they wouldn't need the ad in the first place.

 

So the magazine had plenty of valuable content for 9d.  A good read, and useful things to make.

Grey

I don't often write about what I'm knitting, until it's finished (in case it all turns out badly).  But I thought I would show you two things I am working on just now. 

At the top is a nearly finished sock for me. The yarn is a sock yarn (blue-faced Leicester and nylon) from Countess Ablaze in Manchester, colour Grey Skies in Manchester.  The pattern is a modified version of the Rosedale socks, from Cable Knits by Ann Kingstone.  The main change to her pattern is at the top - I have not done the complex rose-like cable that Ann designed, and I prefer a ribbed top to a picot edge.  Another change  you can't see in this photo: I have used the heel from Ann's On the Other Foot socks because they have a gusset and fit me very well.  And finally, I (unintentionally) worked some of the cables in the opposite direction to what the pattern specified, but I've decided not to worry about that. 

I have stopped work on the socks, temporarily, to start on a Christmas present for my sister.  (She knows all about it, so I don't need to be secretive.)  It is a scarf in a really luscious brushed alpaca and silk yarn.  The photo above looks completely out of  focus, but it isn't - the yarn is just very very fluffy.  It was dyed by my friend Steph (stephscraftybits on Etsy) in a beautiful mottled grey colourway that she calls Smoke.  The yarn came with a free pattern for a lacy scarf.   It's growing fast (on 6.5mm. needles) and is amazingly soft.

I'll show both socks and scarf again when they are finished. 

A New Match

It's very exciting (as I think I've said before) when we identify the pattern that was used to make an item in the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection.  I talked in a recent post about how important it is to have a story to tell about an item of knitting or crochet - the pattern it was made from (if there was one) is a crucial piece of its story.

The 1950s jumper below is one of many items in the collection that were the work of one woman, Jane Denny.  She was a prolific knitter - she commuted to work in London by train, and knitted on the journey.  She eventually gave the Guild more than 50 garments.  The earliest is a pixie hood that she probably wore to go to school in the 1940s, but there are also several little jumpers that she knitted in the 1950s, and later garments too.

We have three feather-and-fan jumpers knitted by Jane Denny in the collection - it was evidently a stitch pattern that she liked very much.  As you can see, it has a buttoned opening at the back of the neck (one of the buttons is missing), which was common in 1950s jumpers. This one is distinctive in having a square neck and dolman sleeves, and those features match it to a Marriner's pattern.

Marriner 266

I like the square neck opening - a neat way of avoiding having to incorporate a curved line of decreases into feather-and-fan.  There is of course a seam along the shoulders, running into the sleeves, and an underarm seam.  It's awkward to seam the wavy edges of feather-and-fan neatly, but I think that the seams would look better when worn (as in the illustration on the pattern leaflet) than when laid out flat.

Marriner patterns at that time included a sketch of the garment as well as a photo, to give you an image to aspire to.  Wearing gloves, earrings and flowers on your shoulder is easily achievable, if a bit impractical for everyday wear, the hourglass figure not really. 

The obvious difference from the Marriner pattern is that Jane Denny's jumper is striped, in two shades of pink and a blue-purple.

Most knitters, I'm told, like to match the illustration on the pattern leaflet as closely as possible, and choose the same colour.  (I've done that myself.)  It's a very useful habit, as far as the collection is concerned -  it helps in matching a finished garment to its pattern. For instance, the pink crocheted disco dress (see here) was easy to recognise because the pattern leaflet also shows the dress in pink.   But Jane Denny not only chose a different colour, but also knitted her jumper in stripes.

One of the earliest cases where I matched a garment in the collection to its pattern was also a Jane Denny jumper, knitted to a Jaeger pattern.  I wrote about it here.

Jaeger 3398

It was knitted to a Jaeger pattern, and again it was designed to be knitted in one colour.  But Jane Denny knitted it in broad bands of four different colours, combining together beautifully. We already knew quite a lot about her, and we know from the quality of the garments she gave to the collection that she was a skilful knitter.  We can now see, comparing these two jumpers with their patterns,  that she also had a very good eye for putting colours together, and didn't just follow the intention of the pattern designer.