
Our latest book, ‘Their Darkest Materials’, will be released on March 2nd, 2020 and is up for pre-order, here:
https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/761841182/their-darkest-materials-book-pre-order
‘Their Darkest Materials’ is about the seamy, dark, sometimes creepy underside of material culture and textile history. A sort of ‘Horrible History’ for grown-ups.
In ‘Their Darkest Materials’, we creep through nineteenth century asylums, debtors’ prisons, charity schools, pubs and marketplaces; the ‘stews’ (brothels) of the city, school-rooms, collapsing London houses, workhouse toilets, small-town waxwork exhibitions in back rooms and see ladies knitting in grand Georgian drawing rooms; following the unravelling thread of history’s textiles.
We’ll find out which Victorian novelist’s mauve ribbon was trapped in her coffin lid and discover clothing-as-evidence in an infamous London burking case (“Burking” as in “Burke and Hare”).
And we’ll watch a Yorkshire farmer’s wife knit a blue stocking on the morning of her murder and a caddish, handsome soldier murdering his stocking-knitting new wife. We’ll also spend time in the county asylum with a world famous dyer’s incendiarist wife and an embroiderer who used her art to say the unsayable.
If you want a little taster, here I am going on (and on) about it here:
A New Season of the Fiber Nation Podcast, or: The Case of the Half-Knit Stocking
The book’s chapters include:
1. Grim and Less Grim Deaths: The Approach of the Destroyer, the Partly-Murdered Knitter & Other Tales
2. The Bewitched Spinning Wheel & Other Tales
3. Murder, Mayhem and Knitting as Evidence
4. The Small Woman: The Nineteenth Century Needlewoman
5. “Virtute et Industria”. The Stick, the Carrot and the Virtuous Child & Also the Trope of the Extremely Old Knitter
6. The Lost: Runaways – Slaves, Servants, Apprentices and The Captive
7. “Twelve Bobbins Spinning”. Charity Schools & Poor Houses
8. Prisons and Idle Loiterers
9. The Dyer Who Watched Storms and also Concerning A Properly Shaped Female
10. Nathaniel Smith, the Knitting Schoolmaster
If you enjoy a bit of gothic and grand guinol… we have just the book for you.
Released March 2nd, 2020. Published At The Sign of the Pretty Baa Lambs Press.

One reply on “PRE-ORDER Their Darkest Materials!”
Pen, Oh my, dear!! It came in this morning’s mail. Thanks so much. I will write more after I read it. I am excited!! Kathi in Calif
On Mon, Feb 10, 2020 at 5:47 AM The Knitting Genealogist – Hemingway & Hunt wrote:
> PLH posted: ” Our latest book, ‘Their Darkest Materials’, will be released > on March 2nd, 2020 and is up for pre-order, here: > https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/761841182/their-darkest-materials-book-pre-order > ‘Their Darkest Materials’ is about the seamy, dark, sometim” >
LikeLike