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Mostly Knitting Blog

Want to find the new stuff on Knitting-and.com, or read about my latest projects and discoveries? This is the place.

Coming Soon, Achoo Cough Cough Cough

The Summer flu (well, technically Spring flu but close enough) is currently attempting to kick my voluminous butt, but it hasn’t stopped me almost preparing a Christmas present for my fellow retro style fans.

The Perfection Cuddly Toymaking Kit, Book No. 1
The Perfection Cuddly Toymaking Kit, Book No. 1

The Perfection Cuddly Toymaking Kit was published in Australia in the early 1950’s as a home education course for women wanting to earn pin money by making toys and gifts and selling them in bulk to local shops.

There are ten booklets in the kit, covering a large range of toys, novelties and bags. If you love retro style toys then you’ll love making the toys straight from the full size patterns, or you can make changes and use them to design updated versions with a more modern look. With all sorts of toys from little felt rabbits to fur fabric penguins, leatherette (or felt) sausage dogs and the obligatory Scotty, to (my favourite) felt flowers and a great knitting/overnight bag to sew, I think you’ll have many of your Christmas presents covered!

Now I just have to stop coughing long enough and I’ll be uploading one booklet per day for ten days. Watch this space for booklet number 1 very soon!

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Technical Dooverage

Knitting-and.com terminally outgrew it’s server over the last couple of weeks so I’ve moved it to a different one with more of everything that makes it go 🙂

I’ve noticed everything is loading much faster for me, I hope it is for you too.  If you encounter any errors, please let me know. I, or one of my work colleagues, will get right on it.

Diva cat getting some work done in my office
One of my colleagues ready for a day’s work.
Tidy kitties on a bookshelf
My other colleagues hard at work doing some filing.

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Lace Knitting. Still…

If you’re a regular visitor you might remember that two weeks ago I said I had almost finished knitting all the usable patterns from “The Ladies’ Guide to Elegant Lace Knitting Etc” from 1884.

Well, I’m still knitting.

My current pile of completed samples looks like this:

A lot of 19th century knitting
A lot of 19th century knitting

No, I wasn’t slacking, I have a very good reason for not being finished yet! I re-read the book. Specifically a section of the book that I thought didn’t have much of use to today’s knitters. It turns out that I had missed some really great stuff so I knit that too. Specifically, all of the blue things. And a beige thing. They’re worth the wait, honest.

I’m currently on the very last 22 repeats of a very skinny edging and then it’s just a matter of a little sewing, a lot of blocking, some photography, a little website coding and then I’m done. I swear! I most definitely will not be knitting samples of the stockings that say cast on 196 stitches with yarn so thin you can’t find it any more on size ridiculous needles. Or the mittens that have you cast on 96 stitches for an infant (OK, I may be making that up but it is a ridiculously large number of stitches for a mitten that’s just going to get chewed and slobbered on).

To be totally truthful, I was tempted to knit the entire beige thing with the original size silk thread on size insanity needles because it’s very pretty but I thought a dk weight sample was more realistic since that (or thicker) will be what most modern knitters will use to make it anyway.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have 22 repeats of a 9 stitch wide edging to go. I’d better get to it before you all start thinking I’ve just been swiping these images off Google Images or something…

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A Matter of Scale

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I’m so close to finishing knitting the samples for the Ladies’ Guide to Elegant Lace Patterns Etc that victory is in sight at last! I just have one tidy (table runner thingy), one afghan (I’ll just be knitting a sample), and the fringe on another tidy to go.

At the moment I’m knitting the very last edging, which is actually the first edging from the book and one of the largest.

Here it is next to one of the smallest for scale.

Lace from "The Ladies' Guide to Elegant Lace Patterns, Etc" 1884
One of the largest edgings from The Ladies’ Guide to Elegant Lace Patterns Etc, next to one of the smallest.

Whilst it has you cast on 50 stitches and work 32 rows per repeat, it’s actually quite easy to knit because it has a lovely rhythm to it. This is a good thing because I still have another two repeats to go 😛

I’m not sure what I’ll be doing with all of my samples after I’ve finished blocking and photographing them for the website. I had planned to frame them but there are just too many. Perhaps some kind of archival book?

Any ideas?

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