The Guild collection at In the Loop

I'm told that work is still in progress on the recordings of the talks at the In the Loop conference in July, so in the meantime, I will write a post based on my talk.

It was a short talk (20 minutes) on a huge collection, so I could only give an outline of what there is. Brief summary: knitted and crocheted items, tools and gadgets, yarn samples and shade cards, publications of all kinds (books, magazines, pattern leaflets and booklets).  Lots of everything.  At the conference, after outlining what's in the collection I talked about how we choose what to present in a trunk show - a suitcase full of selected highlights.  We have been doing trunk shows for a few years as a way of making the collection accessible to groups around the country - the first one was at Sheffield in 2014.  (I wrote about it here.)

When we choose a piece for a trunk show, we have to be able to say something interesting about it.  Ideally, we would like to be able to tell its story: who made it, when, what pattern did they use, who was it made for, and so on.  We no longer accept new donations of knitted or crocheted items unless they come with a story like this, but many of the items already in the collection have no story of that kind.

Sometimes, lack of a story doesn't matter - some of the pieces in the collection are such fine examples of craft that they speak for themselves.

Leaf-and-trellis pincushion cover 

Here is a Victorian pincushion cover that I have shown before on this blog, because it's an example of my favourite leaf and trellis pattern (aka print o' the wave) - I showed it here. Like many of the older items in the collection, it was bought at an antique textiles fair, and had no provenance.  We have no idea who made it and no way of finding out.  But it's a beautiful piece of work.  We don't know when it was made, but I'm sure it's Victorian.   It's possible that it was made to a specific pattern for a pincushion, in which case we might find the pattern one day, but the knitter might equally well have put together the leaf and trellis stitch pattern, and a pattern for a knitted edging (of which there were lots).   Either way, it's a very fine piece of work.

A theme of my talk was that we can sometimes identify the pattern that was used to make a piece, and that this can either provide a 'story' for it, or add to the story that we already have.  And the fact that the collection has so many publications alongside all the knitted and crocheted items helps us match pieces with patterns.

Occasionally, finding the pattern that was used to make an item casts some doubt on its story.  A piece that has often featured in a trunk show is a tea-cloth with a filet crochet edging, which has 'Welcome Home' worked into each side.

As the collection got more organised, it eventually turned out that there are three 'Welcome Home' tea-cloths, one of them with a detailed story.  It had been donated, along with a note of its history, by the daughter of the woman who made it.  The maker, Ethel Booth, was born in 1897, learnt to crochet at the age of 12, and made the tea-cloth for her father who was in the Army during the Boer War, "little knowing there would be the Great War".  That implied that the tea-cloth was made before the First World War (i.e. the Great War), but when I first saw it, before knowing this story, I was sure that it was a First World War design.  And in fact the story doesn't really hang together - the Boer War, or South African War, ended in 1902, before Ethel learnt to crochet.  And the First World War origin was confirmed when we found the pattern for the edging, in a magazine published in 1915.

Fancy Needlework Illustrated no. 33, March 1915.

 The design is called 'L'Entente', and was presumably intended to celebrate the alliance between Britain and France, shown by the British and French flags in the corners.  (Though I must say that filet crochet in white cotton is really not ideal for representing red, white and blue flags.)  The design was evidently a popular one, and I'm sure that the appeal was nothing to do with the alliance, but rather the 'Welcome Home' message.  Someone at home could make it in the hope that their father, brother, sweetheart,.... would come home from the war.

After we had identified the pattern for the 'Welcome Home' tea-cloth, we assumed that Ethel Booth's father had still been in the Army during the First World War, and she made it for him then.  But I've recently managed to trace Ethel Booth's family in census records and so on, and in fact her father had died by 1911.  So the story that she made it for her father is wrong, and I think that probably she made it for her future husband - they married in 1919.

All this happened before Ethel's daughter was born, and family stories often get slightly garbled in transmission, but she knew the final part of the story at first-hand, and I'm sure it's true: the last time the cloth was used was for Ethel's 90th birthday. 

Another item I talked about at In The Loop came with no story at all - it was bought from a charity shop.

It is a remarkably short crocheted dress.  When I first saw it, I mentally labelled it as a beach dress, on the grounds that a beach would be the only possible place to wear it.  But then we found the pattern:

Patons leaflet 6249

And it is not a beach dress at all.  The leaflets describes it thus: "Swingy little discotheque dress which longs to go dancing.  Prettily crocheted in a trendy yarn, with a short flirty skirt and a mini top."  (Did you know that 'disco' was originally short for 'discotheque'?  It's true.)

Because it’s a Patons pattern, and we have the Patons pattern leaflet archive in the collection, we have the master copy of this leaflet, that gives the original date of publication: October 1969.  The one I have shown is a later reissue from the early 1970s.

I'm not sure what you were supposed to wear underneath the dress.  The pattern calls for a pair of 'bra cups' to sew into the dress as a final stage in making up.  (Our dress doesn't have them.)  So you wouldn't need a separate bra.  But as the skirt is see-through (as well as very short) you would need underwear of some kind.  In fact, our dress is even shorter than the one shown in the leaflet - it has 5 fewer pattern repeats in the skirt.  Hopefully, the person who wore it was much shorter than the model.  Or else extremely daring.

Finding the published pattern to match our dress allows us to say a lot more about it than we could just from looking at it - we now have a story to go with it.  I finished my 'In the Loop' talk by showing a piece from the collection that is still in need of a story.

Like the pink disco dress, it was bought for the collection in a charity shop.  It is beautifully made in fine cotton.  But we don't know any more about it - it's difficult even to estimate when it was made.  If pushed, I would guess 1930s, but it seems too long for that date, or for the 1940s or 1950s.  And the work seems too fine for the 1960s or later.  It was very probably made to a published pattern and if so, we can hope to find the pattern one day - and then we will be able to give it an approximate date, and maybe say what it was intended for (a tennis shirt, I would guess).  So if you see a pattern for a shirt like this, please let us know - we would love to be able to include it in a trunk show and tell a story about it.

I'll say more about the Guild collection in future posts. 

Knitted Lace at Parcevall Hall

My friends Ann Kingstone and her sister Marie ran a Yorkshire Knitting Tour last week (finishing today). It was based at Parcevall Hall in upper Wharfedale - a 17th century manor house, extended in the 1920s, when a terraced garden was made.  

Parcevall Hall

On Friday, I went there with a suitcase of 19th century knitted lace from the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection, to show to the knitters as an introduction to two days of lace knitting workshops that Ann was going to teach.

A couple of the things I took to show the knitters have already appeared on this blog, like a pin-cushion cover in print o' the wave stitch (or leaf and trellis, as Victorian knitters would have called it).   Here's a small selection of the other things I had in the case.

I showed another knitted lace pin-cushion cover, this one with its pad inside.  It's suffered some damage from the pins and has been mended, possibly in Victorian times.

Two Victorian knitted samplers had been specially requested, and caused a lot of interest. As did Captain Tweedie's splendid nightcap.

Many of the Victorian pieces in the collection are mats, covers or doileys of various kinds, including this very finely knitted mat.

The basic design, with a sort of four-petalled flower in the centre, is very common, but there are many variations.  It is often used for bedspreads, made up of lots of squares knitted in thick cotton - it isn't usual to see it knitted in very fine cotton.

I had time for a walk around part of the garden, which is open to the public.  And it rained!  (Rain doesn't normally merit an exclamation mark in a British summer, but this year, it hasn't rained for weeks.)  The hillside across the valley was covered in cloud - though the fields were yellow-brown when they should have been green, because it has been so dry.

The garden is a series of terraces stepping down the slope, with wide views across the valley.  But looking along a terrace gives a much more enclosed feeling.

At the back, part of the building was built directly on top of a huge lump of exposed bedrock - which then had a rock garden planted in it.

An interesting house, and a beautiful garden - and evidently an ideal place for a week's knitting holiday. The knitters were very enthusiastic, and keen to examine the things I had brought.  It's great to be able to show pieces from the collection to an appreciative audience, and I really enjoyed joining the knitting tour for half a day.  Ann and Marie are planning to run it again next year, so hopefully I will be back.

'Leaf and Trellis' Stockings

Anyone who was at the Knitting & Crochet Guild Convention in Birmingham earlier this month might have seen a pair of 19th century knitted lace stockings that I showed, to illustrate the kind of object that we have in the Guild collection.  Here's one of the pair. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

They were knitted from the top down, in the round, with a band of double rib to start and then a deep band of stocking stitch, before starting the lace part.  The lace is a stitch that in Shetland lace knitting is called Print o' the Wave, but in 19th century knitting books I have seen it called Leaf and Trellis.   Here it is as it appears on the stockings.  They are knitted in very fine cotton, so that it takes 5 pattern repeats to go round the ankle - there is a huge amount of work in these stockings.

On the way to Birmingham, I found an early version of the pattern, in Miss Lambert's My Knitting Book.  The 7th edition, published in 1844, is available online from the Winchester School of Art library,   I think that Jane Gaugain published the pattern earlier, in 1842 (see my earlier post here), but Miss Lambert might have been the first to call the pattern Leaf and Trellis.

In Birmingham, I knitted a swatch of Leaf and Trellis to compare with the stockings.  I used DK cotton for the swatch rather than anything finer, mainly to be easier for me.  But I wanted it to be visible to an audience, too, and didn't in any case have any cotton thread anywhere near as fine as that used for the stockings, or the tiny needles to go with it (around 1mm thickness or less, at a guess.)

Here's my swatch, with the cast-on edge at the bottom, because that seems more natural to me.  (I actually used the instructions in the 12th edition of Miss Lambert's book, from 1845, also available from the Winchester School of Art library.)

Like the stitch pattern in the stockings and other early versions of the pattern, all the decreases are done by knit 2 together, so they are all right-leaning.   Later versions, and present-day Print o' the Wave patterns, use  both left- and right-leaning decreases to make the pattern symmetrical.  As I wrote here, the Leaf and Trellis pattern published in Weldon's Practical Needlework in 1886 claimed the credit for introducing this variation.

The lace stockings must have been very precious to the woman who wore them - either because she had knitted them herself,  or because they had been bought and must then have been very expensive.  We can see that she valued them, because they have been darned in several places.  The heels wore through, as you would expect, and there are also darns on the back of the calf - perhaps she sometimes wore them with boots?   And there are more darns in the stocking stitch sections at the top of the stockings.  I would have guessed that they would have been kept up by garters, though that seems a bit precarious.  But I really don't know anything about how Victorian ladies wore their stockings, and perhaps they were attached to the corset?  I don't know.  

Here's one of the feet, showing the darn in the heel.  I'm not a sock knitter,  so I don't know whether there is anything unusual in the heel shaping.  The toe shaping on the other hand does look rather peculiar - it looks as though it's designed for an anatomically strange, very pointed toe.

 
But clearly the stockings did fit someone, who wore them a lot and looked after them.  And then eventually they were put away and kept carefully, until the end of the 20th century, when they were acquired for the Guild collection. And we can admire the skill that went into making them, and marvel at the amount of time they must have taken.

My Linen Drape Scarf

I mentioned in my last post that at the show-and-tell session at the Guild Convention 2 weeks ago, I showed the summer scarf knitted in Rowan Linen Drape that I started in April (described here).  I finished it just before the Convention.   

Here it is.  It does drape very well (as it should, given the name of the yarn).  I like the fact that even the stocking stitch stripes are slightly translucent.  And as I planned, it's an open pattern but not too fussy.   

If I've got time (hah!)  I'll write out a chart for the pattern and add it to this post.  And I'll try to take another photo with a better colour - the blue is less grey than in this photo.  

I haven't actually worn it yet - it's been too warm to want to wear a scarf.   But today is cold and damp - a raincoat and a scarf are needed, and it will get its first wearing.  

Practical Knitting in 1886

I was sorting out some miscellaneous Weldon's publications in the Guild collection this week.  Several of them had lost their front covers, or probably had them removed  - the covers generally just had a summary of the contents, and the rest was ads, so they were often discarded.  But it makes life difficult for a cataloguer, because sometimes, as with the Practical Needlework series, the number in the series is only printed on the cover.  But eventually, with not too much cursing, I got most of them into the right place.  In the process, I found one of earliest issues in the Practical Needlework series, from volume 1, dated by Richard Rutt to 1886.

Weldon's Practical Needlework No. 2

It's number 2 of Weldon's Practical Needlework, and also number 2 of the Weldon's Practical Knitter subseries.  I have to admit that that's a bit confusing.  But never mind  - it has some interesting things in it.  Here are a few that caught my attention.

First is a pattern for a knitted quilt square in Foxglove pattern, described as 'exceedingly pretty'.

I recognised the image immediately, because I  had seen one very like it when I was trying to find the pattern used for a 19th century bedspread  - I found the image in an Australian newspaper, the Australian Town and Country Journal, published in Sydney, also in 1886. And now that I compare  the two, the images are exactly the same - the Australian newspaper lifted both the text and the image from Weldon's Practical Needlework, in a cut-and-paste job.  And I can't see any acknowledgement to Weldon's.  To a former academic, that's really shocking behaviour - blatant plagiarism.  On the other hand, much of the wording of the pattern is taken in turn from an earlier book, Needlework for Ladies for Pleasure and Profit by 'Dorinda', though Dorinda didn't illustrate it.  So Weldon's aren't entirely innocent of plagiarism themselves.  Victorian morals weren't quite as pure as some people claim.

Another pattern in the magazine is my favourite lace pattern.  I started out thinking of it as Print o' the Wave, but I now think that that is only its Shetland name - in Victorian knitting books, it seems to have been called Leaf and Trellis (if it was given a name at all).

The description says: ' This is a very favourite old pattern for window curtains, cotton antimacassars, bread-tray cloths, and other articles. It is here rearranged and improved, and the veining of the leaves is carried symmetrically upwards."    (Following a tradition beginning with Mrs Gaugain, the sample is shown upside down, with the cast-on edge at the top - I suppose because it looks more like a pattern of leaves that way.)   The claim of symmetry in the pattern is because some of the decreases are right-leaning (knit 2 together) and some are left-leaning (slip 1, knit 1, pass the slipped stitch over) so that in the 'leaves' you get a line of successive decreases, all leaning the same way, and then a line leaning the other way.  In earlier versions of the pattern (Jane Gaugain's, for instance), all the decreases are done by knitting 2 together.

So it may be that, as claimed, this is an innovation, and the first version of the pattern to have symmetrical decreases.  Or it could be that the magazine has 'borrowed' the improvement from an earlier publication - I'm reserving judgement.

And the other pattern that I particularly noticed was for a Balaclava cap, 'a most comfortable cap for gentlemen travelling or for shooting excursions.'  

 It's knitted in navy blue Berlin wool (merino), with red stripes, on No. 10 bone needles.  I would like to believe that the pattern was written for this magazine, but the image seems very familiar - I'm sure I've seen it before, but can't remember where.  Maybe I have seen it in a later publication, but I'm not very confident - this might be another case of 'borrowing'.

Knitting with beads

I've just finished this beaded wristband, started yesterday evening.  We had a workshop on knitting with beads, at the Huddersfield branch meeting of the Knitting & Crochet Guild.  The workshop was taught by Marie, who had designed the lacy wristband as a quick knit for us to learn on.  She showed us two well-known techniques (well-known even to me, and I had never tried beading before) - first, threading the beads onto the yarn before you start knitting, and second, using a very fine crochet hook to attach each bead.  But the technique we actually used was a new one, which uses dental floss - of a particular type (Oral-B Super Floss, to be exact).  The floss comes in handy lengths and, crucially for beading purposes, each length has a stiffened section at one end that you can thread through a bead. It's a really clever way of adding a bead to a stitch, and looks much easier to do than the other two techniques.  There are tutorials on YouTube explaining how to do it: you can search for "super floss beading".

It was a very well prepared workshop - Marie supplied suitable yarn (wound into neat little centre-pull balls), dental floss and beads, as well as the pattern she had designed.  And she had threaded enough beads for the wristband onto a length of dental floss for each of us.  (On the other hand, I wasn't well prepared at all - the one thing we had to supply for ourselves was knitting needles, and I had forgotten.  Luckily a friend had a spare circular needle with her of the right size, and lent it to me.   

Here's my wristband in progress:

  

And here's the dental floss with beads threaded onto it:

  

Thanks very much to Marie for all the work she put in, and for a fascinating workshop.

A Long, Long Scarf A-Winding

I have been knitting a scarf for my sister for quite a while now - I wrote in August about knitting a swatch for it, here.  It's been my main knitting project ever since, though I've been doing other bits of knitting, too (as well as everything else that needs doing apart from knitting).   It took a long time because of Margaret's specification - she wanted it to be 80 inches long and 10 inches wide (about 200 × 25 cm.)  And it is.

I could have made it a bit longer, because I had 20g. of yarn left, out of the original 200g.  But we had arranged to meet last Monday, so I had to stop knitting and press it before then.  Otherwise, I would have finished off the yarn - I think 80 inches was intended as a minimum, not a maximum, and I don't have an obvious use for 20g. of 4-ply yarn.

It wasn't a surprise present.  Margaret approved the colour before I bought the yarn, and I sent her the swatch so that she could check that it wouldn't be irritating (it's alpaca and nylon, because she can't wear wool).  So on Monday she tried it for size and declared it long enough, before re-wrapping it to put away until Christmas Day.

It is all knitted in dewdrop stitch, from Barbara Walker's Treasury of Knitting Patterns - an easy lace pattern.  Three out of four rows are just k3, p3 all across the row, and the complications that make it lacy are all on the 4th row.

The wrong side looks just as good as the right side, too, though they aren't the same.  In the photo below, the wrong side is shown on the right.

A very successful project - it will be wonderfully warm and cosy to wear.  And not itchy.

A Lacy Shawl

I finished knitting this shawl two months ago, in September, but couldn't write about it because it was a birthday present.  Maura had a significant birthday in March, so the shawl was several months late - but first the yarn was faulty and had to be replaced, and then I broke my wrists and couldn't knit, and then Maura was in Italy until last week.  But now she is back, and I have given it to her, and so I can write about it.

It's the Bosc Pear Shawl designed by Tetiana Otruta.  (A free pattern on Ravelry.)  I knitted it in Louisa Harding's Amitola, a lovely wool/silk yarn that I like very much - I have already knitted a cowl and scarf for myself in it, in other colourways.  Maura's scarf is in Elvira - mostly dark and muted colours, black and purple, with some brighter blue, and a dramatic pink-purple.  The Bosc Pear shawl has bands of stocking stitch, alternating with bands of lace - as you can see from the photo, even the stocking stitch bands are very light and translucent in the Amitola.  It was easy to knit, it looks good and feels beautifully soft.

     
So, very belatedly:  Happy Birthday, Maura.

Print o' the Wave, Again

Another volunteer working on the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection showed me this piece of 19th century knitted lace, because she knows I'm looking out for examples of the Print o' the Wave stitch.

It's knitted in very fine cotton -  the whole thing measures only about 17cm.× 22 cm. (6½ in. × 9 in.). We think that it might have been intended to be a pincushion cover - the centre panel has two layers, with an opening at one end.  (I put a piece of card inside, otherwise you can't see the stitch pattern clearly.)   And the stitch pattern in the centre is clearly Print o' the Wave, but with the zigzag trellis part of the pattern wider than usual.  (Though I doubt that the knitter called the stitch Print o' the Wave, and probably didn't think of it as a Shetland lace pattern.)

In detail, the pattern is not the same as the one published by Mrs Gaugain - as well as the trellis part being 2 stitches wider, the edge is different, and where the two rows of decreases converge, there is a 3-into-1 decrease, whereas Mrs Gaugain has consecutive knit-2-together decreases. But like Mrs Gaugain's pattern, all the decreases are done as knit 2 together, as you might be able to see from the close-up

 It's a beautifully knitted piece  - though as you can see from the close-up, at that scale it's not completely even.  I think that's allowable.  Perhaps the stitches have stretched a bit in the years since it was knitted.  It's far more accomplished than anything I could attempt anyway.   And it's wonderful to have a knitted example of Print o' the Wave from the 1800s, as well as published patterns.

Blackpool

Last weekend a group of us from the Knitting & Crochet Guild in Huddersfield had our second knitting weekend in Blackpool.  As last year, we stayed at Paula Chew's Westcliffe Hotel   We ran our own workshops again - this year we looked at three varieties of lace knitting.  On Saturday morning, Marie did a workshop on Orenburg lace, following on from the talk she did in May.  She knitted several samples to illustrate her talk, and the aim was that we should all knit a similar sample in Blackpool.

I soon found that the yarn I had taken with me wasn't suitable, so I bought a skein of Susan Crawford's Fenella in  the shop in the hotel.  The colour is called Columbine, a very pale mauve.  So here's my finished Orenburg sample in Columbine.  (The colour isn't very accurate, I'm afraid.)

Here's how you knit an Orenburg shawl: you knit a strip of lace as the bottom border first, and then pick stitches along its top edge and the cast on edge.  Then you knit the side borders and the centre at the same time, from side to side.  Then you knit the top border, incorporating one of the centre stitches at the end of every alternate row.  Finally, you join the top border and left edge border with Russian grafting.  (That's a very brief outline...)  Our samples were designed to be like miniature shawls.  In my sample, the cast-on edge is bottom right, and the Russian grafting is at top left, or at least I think it's that way round.  Russian grafting is very neat, and it's hard to see where it is, after you have sewn the ends in.

On Saturday afternoon, we looked at Print o' the Wave, to represent Shetland lace knitting.  I had knitted swatches of several versions, including the one published by Jane Gaugain in 1842, that I wrote about here.  The aim of the workshop was to knit a swatch of a modern version of the pattern.  Everybody managed that, with at least two pattern repeats so that you can see how the design develops.  But I think that no-one attempted the Elaborated Print o' the Wave, from Sharon Miller's Heirloom Knitting.

Several people preferred the 'ordinary' Print o' the Wave anyway, and the Elaborated pattern is harder to follow because it has a 36-row repeat rather than a 12-row repeat.  I like both of them.

And finally on Sunday morning, Ann did an Estonian lace workshop.  She gave us a chart for Lilac Leaf Lace, with nupps.  Nupps are a form of bobble common in Estonian lace and quite tricky to do: first you make 7 stitches out of one, and on the next row, purl all 7 together.  Keeping the stitches loose enough to be able to purl them all together is the tricky part, but Ann gave us a demonstration first.  And all sitting together around Paula's dining table was a good way to learn - everyone else was finding it hard, but getting better, so that was really encouraging.  And Val had a very bright idea to keep the stitches loose, which helped a lot.

I did just a small sample - one and a half repeats, which gives two complete lilac leaves.   (I didn't do a border at the sides, so they are not very neat, and I have cropped them.)  I'm still not sure I like nupps much, but at least now I know that I can do them.  And I do have a plan to try them again.

On Sunday afternoon, we came home.  It was a really good weekend - Paula looked after us very well.  She has been running knitting holidays at the Westcliffe for 10 years, very successfully, which is a great achievement - congratulations to Paula.

Just to prove that we were indeed beside the sea, here's a view towards Blackpool Tower and the pier, taken early on Sunday morning from the end of King Edward Avenue.

Mice in Blackpool

Last October, a group of us from the Knitting & Crochet Guild in Huddersfield went to the Westcliffe Hotel in Blackpool for a Knitaway weekend.  We had a wonderful time, and immediately decided that we should have another weekend away this year.  (Chris Evans interviewed Paula Chew, the owner of the Westcliffe, on his Breakfast Show this week - you can catch it here for another few weeks.)

More people wanted to go this year, so to fit everyone in, we are having two weekends at the Westcliffe, The first was two weeks ago, and I'm in the second group, going next weekend.

As last year, we are running workshops ourselves, this time on lace knitting   Elizabeth Smith, who went on the first weekend did some practising beforehand and made some little mice, wearing lace dresses.  Elizabeth is a very creative knitter - she did a workshop on knitting seaweed for the Huddersfield KCG branch last year.  Her mice are in Jamieson's Spindrift, about 3 inches high (about 7 cm,) and are very mousey.  Their dresses are knitted in Rowan Kid Silk Haze, and are in the three lace traditions of our Blackpool workshops: Shetland, Estonian and Orenburg.  (The Orenburg lace dress is in the mouse paw pattern - Elizabeth says that she was thinking of using the cat's paw pattern until she realised that it wouldn't be appropriate.)   And as you might be able to see, the dresses are trimmed with beads - very splendid gowns for tiny mice.  They are altogether adorable.

A Bedspread Detective Story

A few months ago, an email came to the Knitting & Crochet Guild collections team, with an enquiry about a 19th century knitted bedspread.   The email was from a member of the Blue Mountains Historical Society (BHMS), based near Sydney, Australia, and there was a photo of the bedspread attached. The bedspread is on show in the Society's museum, a 100-year-old cottage called Tarella.  The bedspread was given to the museum more than 10 years ago, and the only information about it from the donor was that it had been knitted by a Susan Beaumont, who had lived in Blaxland (near Sydney). 

Lois, who sent the email, said "The bedspread was in desperate condition, and repairs over the years, prior to accession, had been cobbled together by using whatever thread of whatever colour was available at the time." She had lovingly conserved it, and attached it to a cotton backing sheet to stabilise it and prevent further damage. She had been asked to give a talk about the bedspread, and the work she had done on it, and was hoping that she could find out more about it. 

The BHMS had by this time found out something about Susan Beaumont: she was born in about 1840, and came from Huddersfield.  She emigrated with her husband and four children, arriving in Australia in 1883, and died at Blaxland in 1911.  Lois was hoping that if she could find a date for the bedspread pattern, that might indicate whether Susan Beaumont could have made the bedspread before she left Huddersfield, or whether it had been made in Australia. 

The bedspread is in a style that was common in Victorian times - knitted in white cotton, with the main part in squares, and an edging in a different pattern.  We have examples in the Guild collection, including one that is very similar, but not identical, to Susan Beaumont's.  (The card with '47' records which box it's kept in.) 

I quickly realised that Susan Beaumont probably didn't use a single pattern for her bedspread, but one pattern for the central squares and another for the edging (which is a leaf pattern of a familiar kind).  For instance, A Knitting Book of Counterpanes, published by Mrs George Cupples in 1871, gives patterns for squares, strips and edgings - the knitter can choose a pattern for a square or a strip, and combine that with any of the edgings to make a bedspread.

I was very doubtful that I would be able to find an exact match to the bedspread.  We have quite a few 19th century books of knitting patterns in the collection, and many more are available online - we have some magazines from the late 1800s, too, such as Weldon's Practical Needlecraft.  But the individual patterns are not catalogued, so to find a match to the bedspread we would have to look through all the possible publications  - and to make things worse, some of the knitting books are not illustrated.  Without much hope of finding anything, I looked in Ravelry at illustrations of bedspreads.  (Using Ravelry's pattern browser, it's easy to search for, say, knitted bedspreads with a photo - there are 294.)  Of course, most of the designs are modern, but there are a few of the kind I was looking for - and eventually I found a match!  (Much to my surprise, I should say.) Someone has helpfully uploaded an illustration of an identical square, with a link to the pattern, which was published in 1886 - in an Australian newspaper.

The link given for the pattern is to Trove, a very useful site which has lots of Australian newspapers and magazines (and other archive material) available for public access - you can find the Foxglove pattern here.

Lois was immediately convinced that the Foxglove pattern matches Susan Beaumont's bedspread exactly - and as the pattern was published in  Australia in 1886, after she had emigrated, we decided that she must have knitted the bedspread in Australia.

But then... I was looking for something else entirely in a 19th century book called Needlework for Ladies for Pleasure and Profit by 'Dorinda' when the words 'Foxglove pattern' caught my eye.  There was no illustration, but it was a pattern for a quilt square, and the instructions matched the pattern in the Australian newspaper word for word.  You can download the book from the Winchester School of Art library here - the pattern is on page 78.  I would never have recognised the pattern if I hadn't already seen the illustration, of course - the 19th century knitting books with no illustrations must have been very difficult to work from. 

The Winchester School of Art copy is the 3rd edition, published in London in 1886, but according to the British Library catalogue, the 2nd edition of the book appeared in 1883.  So assuming that the foxglove pattern was also in the earlier editions, it's clear that the Australian pattern copied Dorinda's.  (But the Australian author did go to the trouble of knitting the square and creating the illustration.)   It is just possible that Susan Beaumont got
the pattern from the 1st edition of the book before she left England, and not from the Australian newspaper - I doubt if there is any way to tell now.   

So we have found two possible sources for the square pattern in the bedspread.  Quite a few details are known about Susan Beaumont's life, too.  She was born Susan Holloway in Huddersfield in about 1840, and married William Beaumont in the 1860s. (In spite of its French origins, Beaumont is not an uncommon name in Huddersfield.)  He did various clerical jobs - he was a railway booking clerk in 1861, a book-keeper in 1871 and,  more specifically, a book-keeper to a cloth finisher in 1881, from the census records.  The Beaumonts then emigrated to Australia, arriving early in 1883, with their four children, aged then between 5 and 17.  Susan Beaumont died in 1911, in a small cottage at Blaxland, near Sydney, used by the family as a holiday home.

It is good to be able to tie all this information about the pattern and the knitter to the bedspread - the background story makes it in some ways more interesting than the similar bedspreads in much better condition about which nothing is known. And last month, Lois gave her talk on the bedspread and her conservation work on it, so now I can add my own part of the detective story.  

Knitting Again

The casts were taken off my wrists on Monday, hurray.  So now I can use my hands again and not just my fingers.  The wrists are very stiff and achy, but there's already some improvement since Monday.  I still have a brace on my knee - this one allows for some bending.  It's currently set to a maximum of 30°, and that will be increased in stages.  (That's the summary - non-knitters can stop reading now.)

The next question is: can I knit?  I already have a knitting project on the needles since before my accident, but I didn't want to go straight back to that.  I didn't know how easily I would be able to knit, and my tension might be different at first.  And you don't want a change of tension in the middle of a piece of knitting.   So instead, today I knitted a swatch.  It's a lacy scarf pattern, Different Breeze - a free pattern on Ravelry designed by Sachiko Uemura, and a candidate for the Juniper Moon yarn I saw in Ribbon Circus.

It's knitted in 4-ply (fingering) yarn, on 5mm needles, and as you can see, I managed it - with no difficulty, in fact.  I've shown the swatch straight off the needles - it's supposed to be blocked so that it is more open.  But it's useful to see that there's very little tendency to curl, even though it's based on stocking stitch.

And while knitting the swatch, I didn't feel that my knitting style was any different at all - so I think I can go back to my work-in-progress and carry on.

Orenburg Lace

Yesterday evening, we had the monthly meeting of the Huddersfield Knitting & Crochet Guild, and I managed to get to it (with some help).  The theme of the meetings this year is 'Around the world in knitting and crochet', and yesterday we were in Russia.  Marie had done a lot of research (and a lot of work) on Orenburg lace shawls, and gave us a fascinating talk on its history.  She had bought a hank of Volgograd goat down yarn to show to us, and had acquired a sample of the original goat down - you can feel how warm and light it is just by letting it sit on the palm of your hand for a little while.  (Or so I'm told - the palms of my hands are still covered by the casts on my wrists, and it doesn't work quite as well on fingers.)  To make the yarn stronger, it's plied with another fibre - silk for the finest shawls.

Marie talked about the construction method used for the shawls: you knit the bottom border first, in a long strip;  then turn the corner, and pick up stitches along the straight edge of the border; then knit the centre of the shawl and the left and right borders all together, side to side; then turn the corner at top right and knit the top border, taking in the stitches from the top edge of the centre part as you go.  then finally at the top left corner, you join the top border and left border by grafting.  Not the grafting that you use on sock toes (aka Kitchener stitch), but Russian grafting.  Which was amazing to me, because I wrote about Russian grafting on this blog way back in 2010.  I had never heard of Orenburg lace back then, and it never occurred to me to wonder what Russian knitters might use Russian grafting for - I just thought it was a really neat way of joining shoulder seams (which it is).   But it is also (and I suppose originally) used for finishing Orenburg lace shawls.

Marie talked about the traditional motifs used in Orenburg lace, and had knitted a lot of samples to show them. The samples are constructed in the same way as a full-size shawl, with a border. Most of them were knitted in Rowan Kid Silk Haze, including the rectangular one at top, and this one with the lovely chain of hearts motif.

Chain of Hearts sample

 
And to emulate the finest Orenburg shawls, Marie had knitted a sample in an incredibly fine yarn -  Heirloom Knitting's Ethereal CashSilk (70% cashmere, 30% silk).  There are 1500m. of yarn in a 25g ball,  amazingly - it's finer than sewing thread, and I don't know how it's possible to knit with it. But evidently some people can, including Marie.  (Ethereal is an apt name, I think - "Extremely delicate and light in a way that seems not to be of this world".)

Lace sample in Ethereal Cashsilk 

It was a great evening - I'm so glad I managed to get to it.  Thanks very much to Marie for a fascinating talk, and for all the work she had done beforehand.