21 today

Yes, today is Steven's 21st Birthday! It only seems five minutes since I was blogging about his 20th. He went off to his day centre with a cake to share with his friends. The post hasn't come yet, although some cards arrived on Saturday. And no, he hasn't been at the bottles of sherry so prominently displayed!

I'm in !

Into Ravelry that is. I got my invitation yesterday but have not had time for more than a cursory look around. It is so huge, it will take all my free time just seeing what is there, never mind contributing. As always, housework will go on the back burner although we do have to eat occasionally. I'm Goldthorngirl, of course.

Visitor

I haven't had much time for blogging, or knitting, recently as I have had a friend visiting and we've been out and about. We spent one day in Chester and, of course, a short visit to Stash was essential. Margaret isn't a knitter, so I tried to keep yarn related shopping to the minimum. However these found their way into my bag.......

We also had a short visit from another friend and her two year old grandson. Jacob had never seen unknitted yarn before and was fascinated by the balls of wool I had lying about.

Tomorrow, I should have plenty of time to knit. I'm off to the hospital to act as guinea pig for medical students. It was suggested that I took something to read, so I think there will be a lot of sitting around, but I think the knitting will be coming along too.

1940's knitting

Over the years I have been collecting old knitting books and the advent of Ebay and Amazon has meant an increase in my acquisitions. These Paton's Woolcrafts date from the 1920's to WW2.

I also have several books by Jane Koster and Margaret Murray, published between 1940 and 1950.



All these books are a wonderful source of patterns showing the fashions of those years.
My visit to the Bantock Park 1940's weekend showed little in the way of knitted fashions, so I thought it would be a good idea to knit some of the patterns from these books with the view of putting on a display next year.
The main problem is finding suitable yarns. Most garments were knitted in 3ply, 4ply was considered heavy-weight. There was a little double knitting, but this was extravagant to use as 2 ounces of wool used up one clothing coupon, 2ply was popular for underwear. These days 3ply mainly comes in baby colours, and of course there were no synthetics except for Artificial Silk (Rayon). Also I'm finding getting the tension right is quite difficult, however I'm working on it. More later.