PENELOPE HEMINGWAYI’ve been bowled over by the interest in the General Carleton hat – especially from 18thC living historians and re-enactors. (If you’d like the pattern, it is in Piecework, Jan/Feb 2014). But one question keeps coming up: how do you thrum? I thought I’d tackle this here on the blog. In the 17thC, English sailors […]
Knitting the Old Dales Way. How To Use a Knitting Stick or Shetland Knitting Belt: workshop A rare chance to learn this brilliant, simple but obscure method of knitting. Let’s keep this old Yorkshire craft alive! For its opening weekend, the Yorkshire Museum of Farming is holding a Country Crafts event, and I’ll be doing […]
A few months back, myself and friend, the lovely Caro, spent some time at the Bankfield Museum, in Halifax. We were there to document the spinning wheels – particularly any great wheels – in the reserve collection. For many years, the Bankfield was legendary amongst textile historians and enthusiasts. The current displays are fantastic – […]
“January 27. All Dye pans in use, pretty well off for work this week… Feb 3. Wild soft morning… Saw John Fairbank [who] arrived from America about a fortnight ago- Says he thinks there won’t be a War between this country and America; the poor people are very much out of work at New York; […]
Yesterday, I was watching the incomparable Abby Franquemont’s video download, ‘Respect The Spindle’. I’ve had the book since the week (hour?) it came out but finally got round to getting the video recently, as despite my thirty odd years’ worth of spinning, knew I’d learn something new from it. And I did. At one point, […]
Knitting history is a special corner of textile history, for me, as it tells the story of ordinary people. Knitting was – and remains – something seen as disposable; comparatively cheap to make, so gets used up, worn out and discarded. Pieces of knitting turn up in the archaeology, and finding out about and reconstructing […]
Years ago, the fact I knitted horrified some of my feminist friends. They saw crafts, especially things like cooking, baking and needlecrafts, as conformation to some male imposed stereotype: knitting was a form of being suckered by the male hierarchy. This view was common to the point, I felt unable to knit when at some […]
Yet again, I find myself reverse engineering a pair of Dales gloves and once more, knitting the ‘filler’ pattern known as ‘Midge and Fly’. So thought I’d write a bit about it. ‘Midge and Fly’ pattern was a common motif in two-colour knitting, and can be found on the palms, thumbs and fingers of Dales […]
“…remains without material change. July 28 .. She still knits away with a piece of string and pieces of wool and needles producing only a tangle—if she cannot get anything to employ herself in this manner with she rubs her hands together all day long till she rubs the skin off then she rubs away […]
Last month, I was lucky enough to be invited to the preview of the Close Knit exhibition, at Hull Maritime Museum. The exhibition was created by the Maritime Museum in partnership with the Moray Firth Gansey Project and Hull School of Art & Design. ‘Close Knit”s star turn is a gansey once owned by Poet […]
PENELOPE HEMINGWAY 