PENELOPE HEMINGWAY
Monday 16th May, 1836 A large assortment of Pots at the Market today… but all was pretty quiet, there is no such uproar as there used to be with the Blackguards who attended. I think the Potters are rather more respectable than formerly… [The Diary of Robert Sharp of South Cave, Life in a […]
International Women’s Day today, so I thought I’d write a little about a pioneer woman in my family tree, Jane Moses Wood Roodhouse. Few letters home or journals survive from women pioneers – so it is interesting to know anything about the day to day lives of those women who upped sticks, crossed oceans, then […]
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, […]
Following Old English Word Hord @OEWordHoard on Twitter, this Word Of The Day post caught my eye the other day: scēap-heord, f.n: a flock of sheep. Which I misread as “sheep hoard” – an idea so cool, I wanted to keep it. But “sheep hoard” would be “scēap-hord”, and sadly, that doesn’t […]
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 In all these pieces I’ve tried to uncover new or previously unpublished information […]
Like most Europeans, I had more than one ancestor killed in World War One. Today I found my photos of one of them. He died just over 100 years ago – my dad spoke of him when we were growing up, and his other uncle who died in 1917. I thought it was very […]
Coming up to the final stretch, so to speak, writing the next book – which is going to be about the darker side of textile history. At the moment, I have pieces coming out about the early writers of knitting manuals, which is slightly more cheerful territory. But I’m currently researching something much darker and […]
Currently working on my new book – a sort of horrible histories for people who like textile history. And I found this source, a book about the extant records of a York pawn shop. I haven’t yet been to see the primary source, but have been working on some very similar, previously unpublished sources, I […]
I was very excited to contribute a picture of my new Jonathan Seidel loom to Laverne Waddington’s fantastic Backstrap Weaving blog, a few days ago. Picture can be found here: https://backstrapweaving.wordpress.com/2018/06/22/backstrap-weaving-musical-bands-and-a-bunch-of-looms/ I’m currently learning inkle pick-up techniques, and have been switching between Susan J. Foulkes’ helpful info, and Laverne’s. Susan’s books are mainly on […]
PENELOPE HEMINGWAY 