One punning moment last December, I decided it might be fun to knit the familiar homonyms – yoke and yolk – into an egg-themed sweater. So please behold – my YOLK YOKE. Yes, I am standing in a frozen landscape dressed as a fried egg – what of it? There are so many egg-cellent things…
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Welcome to our Wednesday My Place post! All of the My Place designs feature Milarrochy Tweed – a yarn that’s spun for us in Donegal and which is, in so many ways, a “typical” Irish tweed with its characteristic neps and flecks. Here at KDD, we feel particularly close to our Irish friends, in both…
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Over the years I’ve gathered a small collection of knitting ephemera. This includes a few different styles of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sticks, wisps and sheaths (used throughout Britain for supported knitting) and different kinds of representations–largely photographs or prints–of knitting all over Britain. Such representations do not afford some sort of transparent window onto…
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I am extremely hap-py, because I am about to leave for a research trip to Shetland to do some work for a very exciting book that we will be publishing later this year. Do you want to hear a little more about it? The subject of the book is haps – the beautiful everyday shawls…
Read MorePanel 94: Hill and Adamson The silver herrings and striped petticoats of the Newhaven fisherwoman. In the comments on yesterday’s post, Heather linked to an interesting take on the “when is a tapestry not a tapestry” question from a tapestry weaver who strongly objects to the misappropriation of the term in reference to non-woven textiles.…
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Writing of the worn and mended Fair Isle sweater that Shetland knitter, Doris Hunter created for her fiancé, Ralph Patterson, who spent four years in a Japanese POW camp during the Second World War, editor Sarah Laurenson states: “Ralph’s sweater is much more than a physical object. It is a site of personal and political…
Read MoreHere are a couple more postcards from my collection in which knitting is represented in association with regional / national stereotypes. This is an American card dating from the very early 1900s. It is number 11 in the popular “St Patrick’s series,” whose tone is, of course, incredibly sentimental and nostalgic. One could hardly imagine…
Read MoreHere are a couple more postcards from my collection. Strictly speaking, these are reproductions of advertisments, but I am particularly fond of the Sunlight Soap image which, as you can see, has been pinned on my board for some time. I find it interesting for the way it represents knitting as a leisure activity, rather…
Read MoreI have a small (but ever growing) collection of prints and postcard in which knitters, and the activity of knitting, are represented. Some of these are really very interesting, and I thought I’d occasionally share them with you here. This card, which was posted with an Austrian stamp in 1916, depicts a ‘continental’ knitter working…
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