PENELOPE HEMINGWAYNothing to do with knitting, and very little to do with genealogy. Whilst I’m busy working on a piece for ‘Ply’ magazine, I thought I’d share with you this rather cool list of 19thC dog names I compiled a while back. These were all found in The York Courant and The Birmingham Daily Post, so […]
Last year, we tried and failed to establish a dye garden at the Yorkshire Museum of Farming. Our main problem was slugs. Big slugs. Lots of slugs. Nuclear bombproof mutant slug pellet-survivor slugs. I’ve been an organic gardener all my gardening life, after stumbling on a dog-eared copy of Laurence D. Hill’s ‘Organic Gardening’ that […]
Just realised I’ve made no mention of the fact ‘River Ganseys’ is available for pre-order.: http://cooperativepress.com/collections/books/products/river-ganseys I feel like I wrote ‘River Ganseys’ a million years ago. It is a foray into the arcane world of the inland waterways ganseys, put in the general context of the history of Yorkshire knitting (I hope). There will […]
A Party of Ladies and Gentlemen , from Salt-petre Bank and its environs, enjoyed the amusement of a Hop, a few evenings ago, at The Cat and Bagpipes, on the Fulham Road… the most genteelest couple at the Ball, were a Lady with red shoes, yellow stockings and blue clocks… and much to the credit […]
‘Ply’ magazine’s Winter 2014 issue, “Worsted”, has my snakey handspun inland gansey and I wrote a piece to accompany it. I spun/plied the yarn in around 12 hours. Having read an assertion by my favourite blowhard blogger who claimed to spin the yarn for a gansey in 30 hours, and the suggestion that anyone who […]
This month, I have followed in the footsteps of the mysterious “Mrs Jackson of York”, an 1840s’ knitting manual writer, about whom very little was previously known. With the help of one of Elizabeth’s descendants, I was able to uncover a fascinating story of an astute businesswoman, whose life encompassed both York and St Petersburg, and whose […]
Yarnwise 51 is out. There, you can read more about our weekend at Dove Cottage and what Wordsworth had to say about the old hand spinners and knitters of Westmorland. There’s also a great article by Lou Butt of Lou Butt Designs, about the Nude Ewe – brilliant project promoting our native British sheep […]
The latest Yarn Forward, No 33, features the mysterious and elusive Bob Jenkinson. Some time ago, Filey Museum’s lovely staff gave me permission to use this photo. But there was no real provenance for it – just amongst a batch of things donated long before there was a protocol in place to record the whos […]
I’m ridiculously excited as the first in my ‘Knitting Genealogist’ series is out in the current issue of ‘Yarn Forward’ magazine. (Yarn Forward 29). In it, we featured this undated photo by Lewis Harding which, using my basic sleuthing powers, I was able to date to the early 1870s. I won’t say much about it […]
Here follows a chart in PDF form with the alphabet for the ‘Adderback’ gloves which you can see back in one of the January posts.. 7 row alphabet caps chart Here’s some fun I’ve been having with a lightning pattern (right hand side) from a pair of gloves in the Dales Countryside Museum, in Hawes. […]
PENELOPE HEMINGWAY 