PENELOPE HEMINGWAY
Finally, here it is. River Ganseys – Striking t’loop, Swaving, and other Yorkshire Curiosities Revived From the Archives is out on Ravelry. Your actual hard copies will hopefully be ready for Rhinebeck (The New York State Sheep & Wool Festival). The rather wonderful Schoolhouse Press will be stocking the book. That makes me happy on […]
…each Girl has the following articles given to her: A Pair of Scissors A Huswife A Thimble A Work Box A Knitting Sheath A Work Bag A Pincushion A Comb and Case At Easter she is allowed to have her Scissors ground; a Pincushion and String, Huswif mended, Her Thimble changed… a new Comb if […]
The General Carleton hat has just been republished in Interweave’s ’10 Best Patterns from Piecework’s Historical Knitting Collection’. I’m hearing from museum historical interpreters, and living historians all over, that they have made this hat. Canadians love it for some reason! It has a certain crazy charm to it. If you can’t find the yarn […]
Mithrandir Fingerless mitts Simple diamond patterned fingerless mitts, knitted in the round. I wanted to use up leftovers of 5 ply guernsey yarn, but realise not everyone has that lying around so made the same pattern, with the same sized needles, using DK as well. As you can see, the guernsey 5 […]
Got a parcel, this morning. Getting parcels is always brilliant, but this was a particularly brilliant parcel. Some print copies of ‘The Old Hand-Knitters of the Dales’. These will be distributed around the shops of museums in the North of England who helped us during our period of research. I will put up details soon. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Ever wanted to know how the writers went about researching and writing ‘The Old Hand Knitters of the Dales’? Or do you want to know more about ‘the terrible knitters of Dent’? How people knitted at commercial speeds in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the Yorkshire Dales? And what did they knit? What is […]
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 […]
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 […]
PENELOPE HEMINGWAY 