I finished i-cording the Earth Stripe Wrap and made a decent start on the ends. I'm just tying neat knots and cutting off the rest. To hell with it.

Bits and Pieces

My secret knitting of a while back was this sweater for (as she turned out to be) Frances Campbell, Lorna's baby. I finally got it into the post yesterday. (In our early years in Drummond Place we had a post office around the corner, and I was in there at least twice a week. It’s gone; I miss it sorely.) If I’d known back then that she was going to turn out to be a girl, I’d have held out for the Tulip Jacket. Anybody else want to have a baby? Don’t answer that.

This one was knit in an Opal self-patterning yarn.

Jean, my assumption that some people had stashes during the war was based on no evidence except the invariancy of human nature. I think there must have been some prosperous knitters of middle age and more in 1939, who had stashes. Your grandmother’s generation rather than your mother’s. Of course there wasn’t much prosperity around, in the 1930’s. But I wonder.

When my stash first began to form, when I was in my late 30’s I guess, I thought it was a vice unique to me. It was only the internet that taught me otherwise.

Thanks for all the WWII memories and links. Even in the US, people painted their legs brown and added fake stocking seams, Knititch. At the beginning of the war, stockings were silk. That source was removed utterly – what silk there was, was needed for parachutes. Nylon got invented or at any rate, developed, as the war progressed – I think I remember the newspaper account of the brave man who first jumped out of an airplane with nothing but nylon to ease his descent. After the war, that’s what stockings were made of. In between, pretty well zilch.

Grannypurple, I’ll look for that book “Mass Observation”. It sounds just what I need.

Thinking more yesterday about VKB No. 19, it occurred to me that there are no men in it. In the 30’s and in the late 40’s and 50’s, there was usually a man’s pattern or two in every issue. And they appeared not infrequently in the drawings (1930’s) and photographs of the actual designs – slightly out-of-focus, perhaps, gazing with admiration at the model in her knitted whatever-it-was.

Not so in 1941. No men. I flipped through the recent Anniversay Issue of Vogue International – there aren’t many men there, either: none in Vogue’s actual fashion photographs, one or two in the ads. But that’s because they’ve gone out of fashion, like cigarettes.