In June’s ‘Family Tree Magazine’ I will have a piece about crafts done by ancestors in asylums. Here on the blog, I like to share those fascinating bits and pieces from my research that I can’t shoehorn into my writing. Amongst the documents I used for the research, was the ‘Visiters’ Book’ [sic] of the […]
Month: April 2014
It still doesn’t feel real, to me, but… The new edition of ‘The Old Hand-Knitters of the Dales’ is here! Our new edition reproduces the text of the 1951 First Edition, but we have added a Dales glove pattern and an Introduction, which gives biographical information about the previously mysterious writers/illustrator, Misses Hartley and Ingilby. […]
Found In A Ghastly Shape
I took up the challenge to trace the previously elusive Dr Richard Lloyd Pinching; a rather sinister presence who figures in the embroidered rants of Lorina Bulwer. Pinching was a surgeon from Northern Ireland who practiced in Walthamstow for over twenty years, surviving scandal (it came to light that he had sent a series of […]
Lorina Bulwer, “A Properly Shaped Female”
“I MISS LORINA BULWER WAS EXAMINED BY DR PINCHING OF WALTHAMSTOW ESSEX AND FOUND TO BE A PROPERLY SHAPED FEMALE ” [From Transcript of one of Lorina Bulwer’s embroidered letters]. Last year, someone asked me to go look at a fascinating textile – some kind of embroidered sampler – they had in storage at the […]
‘Yarnmaker’ No 18 is just out, and with it a piece I did about Great Wheels . On a Ravelry thread in the Yarnmaker Group this week, someone referred to this picture, (above) and asked what the elderly lady was doing. The answer is… that is a click or clock reel. AKA “weasel”. […]
This weekend, I’ll be mostly going on about the history of Dales knitting. So just a reminder to anyone who fancies a day out at the Yorkshire Museum of Farming. It’s Country Crafts weekend, so there will be various living history folk, and craftspeople in costume, around the museum. I will be there in full […]