PENELOPE HEMINGWAY
When I’m not knitting or genealogy-ing, I like to fix up vintage sewing machines and sew with them. I spent some time, earlier this year, fixing up Victorian/Edwardian hand crank machines; £11 – £15 car-boot bargains; a Singer 28K and a couple of Jones Family C.S machines. Vintage, metal machines have none of the built-in […]
Nothing 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 […]
From the Patients’ Disbursement Books, The Retreat, York. Ref: Ret 3/10/1/1 Judith Robertson 1799 10 Sept, 1799 Knitting needle 3d 1800 8 June Patent knitting needles 3d Pasteboard 4d – 7d 22 Sept shrowd – 7-/ 6d coffin 42 -/ (Pasteboard = cardboard, used to make bonnet brims). The casual – and all too […]
…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 […]
“Angola. 1827. A corruption of ANGORA: the fabric made of angora wool” The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1983. The Shorter OED has the first recorded incidence of “angola” as 1827, but I stumbled on an unpublished reference to it, in the 1807-16 Disbursement Book of The Retreat asylum, in York. (Held at the Borthwick Institute, […]
On the day we got our (catastrophic) election results, I thought I’d hoist the red flag (well, red petticoat) and talk about living history then and now, and the random thoughts I had whilst re-modelling a piece of ‘costume’ from the 1980s. Comrades, the Red Flag is at half mast today. But the red petticoat […]
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 […]
First published in ‘Knit Edge’, No 3, May, 2013. Putting a name and finding the life story to one of one Dent knitter. Margaret Thwaite: A Knitter of Dent in the York Retreat Asylum “…remains without material change. July 28 .. She still knits away with a piece of string and pieces of wool and […]
PENELOPE HEMINGWAY 