PENELOPE HEMINGWAY
Here’s some events coming up in the next few months. I’ll add in new ones as they’re finalised. 24th February, 2 – 3 PM. An Afternoon in Dove Cottage: For the Love of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal. Sold out! My partner in crime, Caro Heyworth and I will be doing a fireside chat, at Dove Cottage […]
202 years ago this month, the show trial of a handful of Luddites ended, and men were hung at York Castle after a ‘Special Commission’ at York Assizes. They built the scaffold unusually high, so the crowd of thousands could see the men die, like a farmer hangs a few crows pour encourager les autres. […]
“Victorian parlour ladies” has become a derogatory phrase when it comes to describing the history of crafts. I wrote this some time ago for Love:Crochet. Crochet is not ‘my’ craft but it was interesting to look at its history, as it was so beloved of the “Victorian parlour ladies” of the 1840s and sheds some […]
The village of Dębki in Poland, long had a myth about a British shipwreck and the survivors who came ashore – although the name of the ship was long forgotten. Dr Michal Wozniewski, interested to see if there was any truth in the Dębki folklore, found the remains of a wooden vessel on the sea […]
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 […]
‘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 […]
Or: or “How The New Edition of This Book Beloved By Knitters, Came About….” Today I thought I’d give an insight into how we put together the new edition of “The Old Hand-Knitters of the Dales”, that classic, much-loved book on the history of Yorkshire knitting… Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley produced six books together, […]
I’m always compelled by genealogy when it put stories and faces to names. And it being 100 years since WWI, I wanted to write something in memory of my two great-uncles who died in that War. One of them was the reason I got into genealogy in the first place. I was going to keep […]
Today I’m re-visiting the subject of a recent blog post. Killingbeck, Leeds gent George Walker (1781-1856), toured Yorkshire in 1813-14, recording the clothing of the ordinary man and woman for his book, ‘Costume of Yorkshire’. Plate XXIII showed a teasel field, and was sketched/painted in the village where I grew up. Many of Walker’s […]
On impulse, I entered this year’s Spinzilla competition. Mainly because I’ve spent some time this year figuring out the sheer amounts spun in a day or a week by late 18th/19thC handspinners, and wanted to see if I could equal them; or even if the figures I’d arrived at were feasible. Also because I like […]
PENELOPE HEMINGWAY 