Skip to main content

What did you do in the war Grandad?

I entered a competition on my friend knittingtastic's blog a few weeks ago. She posed the question:

Tell me your favourite knitting figure from history and why they top your list. 

I didn't win but think what I wrote about is worth sharing here:

My OH’s grandfather was by all accounts was a thoughtfully lovely chap. He was stationed in the Falklands during WWII as the islands doctor. Luckily for him life there was relatively quiet so he picked up his knitting needles and knit his wife a dress. 

I’d love to ask him which yarn he used, was it from local sheep, did he bother with tension swatches, you know, all those knitterly questions. I remember my OH’s gran recalling with fondness the dress he’d made, which he gave to her as a gift when he returned home at the end of the war. 

Apparently it was a very good fit and well made, which I am a little bit in awe of as they were half the world away from each other and he didn’t use a pattern. 

I trot out this story when people make inane comments about knitting being just for women.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Lashing and lashings...

As well as talk of Clementine Cake on twitter there has been talk of brewing Ginger Beer. Ginger beer is my drink of choice and I'm always in search of a good one. I find many commercial ones too sweet. Once on holiday in Brasil I had a ginger beer made with freshly squeezed ginger which is the gold standard at the moment and a tough act to live up to. @eskimimi (who has a lovely blog ) linked to this River Cottage recipe last week . I had to hunt around for brewers yeast as the brewer's yeast you can buy in chemists and health food shops is deactivated so won't work for brewing, despite the name. (trade descriptions act anyone?). I ended up buying my yeast online after consulting my brewing guru Bioniclaura . As well as knitting Laura brews her own beer, which I got sample when I stayed with her and her lovely dog and husband in Dublin when I went over at the end of October. More on that later. I couldn't wait to get started but had to wait til we returned from Hasti...

Just beet it - part II

Here it is. The beetroot dye experiment results. I had read that beetroot turns a disappointing orange colour when the dye is set. The most saturated end turned a beautiful burnished orange however the far end of the skein, which had been a delicate shade of pale pink before cooking was a mucky yellow. The cream/mucky yellow colour dominated the skein and wasn't as graduated as I'd hoped for. I decided to redye the cream section, leaving a small section of the Naples Yellow (mucky yellow) for contrast (I actually like the colour in small amounts and looked up a nicer name in my Artists Colour Manual). I added a few drops of pink food colouring to the beetroot vinegar just to see what happened and over dyed the mid portion of orange with more beetroot vinegar with a few drops of red food colouring. This is how it looked while drying... ...ta dah ! Here it is reskeined . Well half the skein anyway. I was in a rush as I wanted to enter it in a dip dyeing competition on Ravelry w...

Knit Nation

I've been busy over the last week taking p/hop to the Knit Nation festival in London. It was good fun but I'm still a little dazed from 3 full on days of talking to knitters. It was fab and I've met some brilliant people so I will share it in photo form. Here's our stand, manned by yellowpurplezebra and cybil. Bad pub photos from Friday night with Stitch London Stitchettes, WoollyWormhead, @julietillyflop (who makes fab knitting tea towels ) Babylonglegs, @knitterbird and Bionic Laura (who stayed with me and brought me some gorgeous Aran yarn from Ireland) There was a grout baby and also some tipsy yelling at Ysolda and Sazknits and Jess and Casey the marvellous people who made Ravelry when we spotted them on the way to the tube. On Saturday I made sure I had time to shop and bought some sock yarn from Renaisance Dyeing... ... creepily fabulous stitch markers from The Bothered Owl ... As well as a fab needle roll with Mexican Day of the Dead pattern I also bought some...