It’s been the Easter school holidays. That’s one of my excuses for not blogging lately, but that doesn’t mean that work on my projects hasn’t been almost constant.
On the 25th March I travelled up to Glasgow by coach with my daughters and attended a War-time Knitting conference, The Kitchener Stitch, organised by Lynn Abrams from the School of Humanities, University of Glasgow on Friday 27th March. The Speakers were Dr.Jane Tynan from Central St.Martins, Wendy Turner from the Glasgow Women’s Library, Joyce Meader, Vintage Knitting expert, who spoke about War-time Knitting from the Crimea to Contemporary, and who showed many, many examples. And Barbara Smith from the Knitting and Crochet Guild.
Besides talking for about an hour without a microphone and without written notes, every minute of which was entertaining and informative, Joyce also had several tables set up with vintage knitting patterns, books and tools and a vintage sock knitting machine. And she also made one of the most, for me and the “small comfort” project, interesting and useful comments whilst she was in the audience making a contribution to another Speaker’s talk: that sometimes when on the front the soldier would receive a knitted item, for example a mitten without a thumb section and he might unpick some of the stitches and then, using (and this to me was the exciting part) some barbed wire straightened out to make knitting needles would make for himself some thumb sections. I spoke to Joyce about this afterwards and she added that he might also use a part of his rifle cleaning apparatus to make the knitting needles, but my heart (and macabre imagination) were already fired by somehow including the barbed wire knitting needles as a part of my piece.
At Joyce’s tables I also discovered a vintage cable knitting needle and with some vague hope asked Joyce if they were WW1. Sadly they weren’t which means that I will need to learn to knit with four-five double pointed knitted needles when it comes to making the balaclava etc.
I wore the red knitted ‘Up-and-over’ pullover, the beginning of my “small comfort” project, to the Knitting Conference. I’d completed that a week before the conference. Then in the days leading up to the trip to Glasgow I made the Vintage Knitting bag out of black silk and cotton fabric and satin lining. And began work on the Chest Protector prototype-in-red.
I made about nine pages of notes during the Conference, but the real treasure of the day had to be the comment by Joyce about the barbed wire knitting needles: in my mind’s eye I re-imagined them as four double pointed needles around the throat of an unfinished balalclava. (In the fairy-tale “the Wild Swans” Elise, sister to the eleven swan-brothers, does not have time to complete the sleeve for her youngest brother and as she throws the shirts over her brothers to restore them to their original form the youngest brother remains with one of his arms a swan’s wing.)
