PENELOPE HEMINGWAY
I made some databases, number crunching the known Dales knitters from the censuses 1841-61. And it’s been some time but our day out yesterday in rainy, beautiful Gayle and Hawes made me think that some of you, Dear Readers, might be interested to see this data …
Recently, I was behind the scenes at The Dales Countryside Museum in Hawes. There to read the (unpublished) diary of Marie Hartley, one of the co-authors of ‘The Old Hand-Knitters of the Dales’ (1951). I’ll be transcribing the relevant parts of Miss Hartley’s diary over the coming months. Earlier diaries covered her writing partnership with […]
…In the Before Times, our talks were mainly in the North of England. But tomorrow, wherever you are, you can come and see us …
Sort of explains why my input here has been sporadic in the past year…
Over on my other blog, new post about something that lives in my wardrobe. And it’s not moths. Read and enjoy! I won’t repost it here, just send you on an Expedition over there…
…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…
More wartime letters found with a dolls’ house, abandoned on the pavement outside a charity shop. The letters came from an eight year old to her father, who was in the RAF and stationed many miles from home. Children’s wartime letters are not easy to find and give us a fascinating glimpse into lives historians […]
Pattern for this is available on Ravelry: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/bad-ass-snowflake-hat And our Etsy shop here. I made this from a widely available superwash DK – pretty well any strongly contrasting DK leftovers might do it. Designed especially for those of us who are ‘snowflakes’ – but bad-ass. Because knitting is political. We have new nalbinding […]
A while back, I was researching late 18thC/early 19thC automata, after coming across an advert in a Georgian issue of one of the York newspapers, for an exhibition of them – there will be more on this in my upcoming book. The idea of some room in a cramped Georgian house, by the city walls, […]
The most recent one in my series of pieces about nineteenth century designers/knitting manual writers is out in ‘The Knitter’ 131. It’s about the Yorkshirewomen, the Ryder sisters – another sister act, like the West Country’s Cornelia Mee and Mary Austin. In all these pieces I’ve tried to uncover new or previously unpublished information […]
PENELOPE HEMINGWAY 