Quetzals and Llamas

I have been sorting a lot of Wendy pattern leaflets from Lee Mills recently - several boxes full, of all dates from about 1950 to about 1980.  (We have many more recent leaflets as well, but I had had enough by then.)   Following my visit to see Elizabeth Forster's archive, I was hoping to find patterns designed by her.  Two Wendy patterns are illustrated in her book, The Wandering Tattler, and we found an advert for another in one of her scrapbooks.   And I did find all three. 

It was nice to see the first two in colour.  The full-colour version of the jacket with a pattern of quetzals is quite startling, in fact.   It's supposed to be a resplendent quetzal, the national emblem of Guatemala, which is mostly green with a red front says Google, so the colours are not strictly accurate, but at least they are bright enough.    The pattern of the other, with llamas, was inspired by a trip to Peru. These both date from the mid-1970s, I guess. (The book was first published in 1976.)    

The quetzal pattern leaflet is another that has a stamp from Mrs Patrick's wool shop at Broomhill in Sheffield, that I wrote about earlier.  While I was sorting all the Wendy leaflets, I found a lot with Mrs Patrick's stamp, all of the same vintage, all in pristine condition.  They must have come directly from the shop somehow, and were never sold.  We have very few records of how any of the pattern leaflets came into the collection, unfortunately.     

The third Elizabeth Forster design is a late 1960s dress and coat, in a sort of Aran style.  This pattern must have been quite popular, to judge from the fact that there are several copies in the Lee Mills collection.  

I must say I have never understood the point of short, sleeveless, woolly dresses - (quite apart from the sagging potential of knitted skirts and dresses).   If it's warm enough to wear a thick wool dress, your arms and legs freeze, surely?        

A Designer's Archive

About a year ago, I wrote here about Elizabeth Forster,  a designer who seemed to be almost completely unknown, but by her own account in her book, The Wandering Tattler, had designed knitting patterns for magazines and spinners over a long period.  I thought then that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find out much more about her work, but fortunately I was wrong.  Although she died some years ago, she had kept a lot of paper work - files of correspondence, invoices and typed pattern instructions, as well scrapbooks of her published designs.  And all this material still exists, along with many of the made-up samples.  It has all been in her house, as she left it, and her friends who inherited it all are now trying to sort it all out and match the garments with the patterns - and contacted me when they saw what I had written in this blog.  

At the end of March I went to visit them and see the collection - I was very excited at the prospect, and it was absolutely fascinating. There are 60 dresses alone, as well as suits and coats, and probably more than a hundred jumpers and cardigans - and these represent only a fraction of her designs. 

She was designing knitting and crochet patterns  from 1947 into the 1980s, so there is a huge range of styles and fashions in her work.  For some of the garments, the best that you could say is that they are of their time - such as the knitted knickerbocker suit.   But none of them are boring - they all have some interesting detail.  Many of the designs, like the two jumpers I photographed, have two-colour geometric patterns that are evidently based on things she saw on her travels, as she described in her book.   

Two favourites from Elizabeth Forster's scrapbooks:  one is from the Daily Mirror in 1960, with Adam Faith wearing a jumper that she had designed.  (For younger readers, Adam Faith was a pop star, back then.)  The caption reads "Knit this sweater for yourself or your own special Adam."

The other appeared in Woman's Own in 1967, and was modelled by Joanna Lumley.  The original jumper still exists in the collection. It was apparently made in one piece, with the ribs that are vertical on the back and front becoming horizontal in on the sleeves - not all of the designs are 'ethnic'.


Elizabeth Forster became a full-time freelance designer in 1956, in her late 40s.  Thereafter she spent 9 months of the year designing, to supplement her BBC pension and fund three months travelling and bird-watching every winter.  She always travelled independently and rarely booked any accommodation before she left home.  She especially loved the Himalayas, and trekked to Everest Base Camp when she was in her 70s - altogether she must have been a remarkable woman.  She died in 1995 at the age of 87.  




She was a prolific designer, and employed a small team of knitters to put her ideas into practice.  Her designs appeared in many magazines and newspapers including Woman's Weekly, Woman and Woman's Own, as well as designing for spinners, especially Wendy Wools.  It is sad that her work, and that of other designers, was unacknowledged at the time and so is now almost unknown.  During my visit, I could only skim through the files of correspondence, but that was enough to find out quite a lot about the knitting business of those days and the relationships between designers, spinners and magazines.  There is a lot more to be discovered from Elizabeth Forster's archive, I'm sure.  Her friends hope to find a permanent home for it, accessible to anyone interested in the history of knitting and crochet.

Spring, Summer, Winter

For several days last week it was warm enough to go out without a coat, or even a jumper.  In March!  Unheard of!      And then this week it snowed. 

But I am well-prepared for cold weather, because I have just finished the jumper in Twilleys Spin Knitting that I wrote about earlier.  

It is very light; although I made it quite long, it only took 360g of the 550g pack.  I washed it as soon as it was finished to get the oil out.  The washing water turned very murky, and now the wool smells much nicer.  And it is warm and cosy to wear.   For a while it looked as though I would not be able to wear it before the autumn, but it is just what I need, now that the weather has switched back to cold.  I hope that soon we shall have warmer weather again and I'll have to put it away with the rest of my winter woollies.  It was very easy to get used to the summer temperatures that we had last week.  I have started to knit a cotton/linen cardigan in anticipation.

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

Fimo jewellery

A few weeks ago, my craft-y friend Steph ran a workshop on making buttons in Fimo modelling clay for the Thursday Knit and Natter group.  She has made a lot more things in Fimo since then.  She bought a pasta machine to help - it makes softening and rolling out the Fimo much easier, and gives more even results.  (Not to be used for making pasta afterwards, though.)  At the Knit and Natter session today, she brought along some jewellery sets that she has made, and I bought the one in the photo.  I love the combination of colours.  Two of the clays she has used are slightly sparkly, and the finished pieces have been glazed.   A long way from plasticine.

Spin Knitting

I don't usually write about my knitting projects until they are finished, because sometimes they don't work out.  Sometimes I have to unravel the whole lot and use the yarn for a different project entirely, and writing about that would be very disheartening.   So for instance,  I was knitting a cardigan for several months last year which has not gone well at all - I have knitted most of it twice and it looks like I shall have to abandon it.   I was following the pattern rather than tinkering with it as I usually do, so it is annoying that it hasn't worked.   And I don't want to write any more about it. 

But I think that maybe I should write more often about work in progress, when I am modifying a pattern or making it up as I go along.  So here's one I'm knitting now - though actually it's nearly finished and I'm confident that this one is going to work, because it's made top down and I can try it on as I go.

The yarn is some 1970s yarn, that we found at Lee Mills, called Twilleys Spin Knitting.  I had never heard of it until I was sorting the Twilleys pattern books, and found one for Spin Knitting which seemed intriguing.  Then the following week, I saw a pack of it in a pile of odd balls of unwanted yarn, and bought it. 

The pack contains 550g of yarn in a single length.  It is a single ply, and it gets twisted slightly as you knit it and that "completes the spinning process", it says, hence the name.  It's oiled wool (so makes your fingers soft but smelly) and a natural creamy colour. The pack label warns you to keep the plastic wrapper on, except for a hole in the top for the yarn to go through - otherwise there is a danger that the whole lot would fall out of the paper band into a horrendous tangle.  

The pack does not give the length of the yarn, except for saying that it is much longer than the same weight of other yarns of similar thickness, so it would have been difficult to estimate what I could knit with it, without the pattern book.  But there was a pattern for a long sleeved jumper in my size, that would use exactly one pack, so that's what I planned to make.

Diamond pattern jumper

Although the original plan was that I would knit something like the diamond pattern jumper in the pattern book, I wanted to knit it top down rather than bottom up (in case I ran out of yarn, which would be easier to cope with around the hem than around the neck) and in the round.  I based it on Barbara Walker's book Knitting from the Top, and followed her instructions for a raglan-sleeved pullover.  Except that she adds the neck band afterwards, by picking up stitches around the neck, and I do hate picking up stitches.  So I figured out a way to start with the neckband - tricky, because as well as doing short rows to make the front of the neck lower than the back, I had to decrease at the front after the neckband, because the front of the neckband is longer than the back.

That all worked fine, except that I had originally planned that the jumper would be in reverse stocking stitch, like the one in the pattern book, but then I decided that the knit side looked neater than the purl side, so I turned the whole thing inside out.  And then when I got to the diamond pattern, I thought that it would not show up so well against the knit background, so I switched back to reverse stocking stitch.

So far, the jumper has been knitted with a single continuous thread, although I shall have to break it to knit each sleeve.  And there will not be a single seam in the whole thing, yippee.  I guess it's a bit retro, really, though as I can remember the 1970s perfectly well it seems a bit strange to think of it that way. 

I don't think the Spin Knitting yarn can have been a great success - it's not very portable and not very economical either. If you wanted to knit a larger size of jumper, you would need to buy two packs of yarn and then have a lot left over - the pattern book is full of patterns for hats, scarves and mittens to use up the surplus.  But I think my jumper will turn out well - warm but light.  (I'm hoping that I can get rid of the oily smell when I wash it.)  I'll post about it again when it's finished.

By the way, someone has yarn-bombed Saltburn pier, with an Olympic-themed scarf, 50 yards long.  Do take a look - it's wonderful.

Cold February, Warm Jacket

Yes, I know it is now March. But I finished knitting a jacket/cardigan about 2 weeks ago when the weather was still very cold, and have been wearing it a lot, and have only now got around to writing about it.  Even though there was the extra leap day in February.

I am pleased with it - it is warm and cosy and looks good, and it is the first thing I have knitted that I designed myself (though I have often tweaked a pattern rather than following it exactly).  I took the sizing and the shape from a favourite knitted cardigan that I bought years ago and wear a lot, though it is otherwise not very like the new jacket.

I used a thick, soft yarn - Wendy Chunky Merino, knit on 6mm needles.  I chose such a thick yarn because I wanted it to be very warm (and I wanted a quick knit, too).   The colour is called soot,  which is a misnomer.  Soot is black, no question, but this is a sort of slate blue - a very dark purply blue-grey.

I wanted some texture in the fabric, but a lacy stitch pattern would be unsuitable for this weight of yarn, and cables would make it too thick, so I added panels of a stitch pattern made purely from stocking stitch and reverse stocking stitch, as in fishermen's gansey patterns. Without the last stitch on either side, it could be extended to an overall trellis pattern, but having only one repeat gives a totally different effect.  The zigzags look almost like cables, but without the thickness.  The rest of the jacket is in plain stocking stitch, except for moss stitch for the cuffs, button band, neck band and  bottom edge.

The purply red buttons were not what I originally intended.  I went to the button shop to look for some sober black buttons, but couldn't find any I liked.  These are a better choice, I think - they brighten up the whole jacket.

Although February started cold, the last week has been very mild, and today was a beautiful spring day.  But if it stays too warm to wear my jacket again until the autumn, I shall not complain.