We’ve spent some time looking at the workhorse Great Wheel of the common woman – and ‘professional’ spinner – as far as any 18thC spinner was ‘professional’… So… How about them there fancy spinning wheels? York became a centre of excellence for wheelmakers in the late 18thC and early 19thC so I didn’t have to […]
Category: handspinning
The records of The Retreat asylum, in York, present some fascinating data for textile and costume historians. Possibly the most valuable of all the tens of thousands of pages of records, are the Patients’ Disbursement Books. These recorded patients’ spending money and also monies patients earned from work, themselves. In the late eighteenth and earlier […]
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Spinning the Boss Cow Way
This week, I’ve mostly been spinning gansey yarn. Here is some of it on the clothes horse. It’s been washed and is dried unweighted. That is the extent of ‘blocking’ for knitting yarn. Why is commercial guernsey yarn always 5 ply? Because guernseys came about post Industrialisation. By the 1820s, most yarn in England was […]
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Very Amiable Gentlewoman
Still employing myself studying the (historical) crazy. Digging around in some York archives, last week. For an upcoming article in a genealogy magazine about crafts and eighteenth/nineteenth century insanity. Here are some snippets I thought might interest readers, but I can’t shoehorn into the piece ~ some more fascinating reasons for inmates being “a […]
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, […]
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 […]
The Tour de Fleece runs every year, for the duration of the Tour de France, hand-spinners all over the world set their own wheels spinning, like the cyclists, setting themselves challenges and try to spin yarn daily, even if it’s just for ten minutes. Some people use the Tour to expand their skills, others just […]
One thing about Yorkshire folk is – we don’t suffer fools gladly. Look away now if you’re squeamish. This is going to get honest. Anyone coming here from Ravelry, pull up a chair and bring the popcorn. You already know where I’m going, with this. I like exploding myths and poking at bullshit with a […]
They say “blood will out”, and so it seems to have proved. We broke the last brick wall in my family tree a few months back. Names included: Lister, Smith, Dawson and Crabtree; a long line of wool weavers, clothiers, and mill-owners in Longwood, near Huddersfield, and in Halifax. My surname should have been the […]
We hear from Wingrove, near Aylsbury in Bucks., that a few Days ago, one Susanna Hannockes, an elderly Woman of that Place, was accused by a neighbour of being a Witch, for that she had bewitched her Spinning-Wheel, so that she could not make it go round, and offered to make an Oath of […]
PENELOPE HEMINGWAY 