‘Herself’ – and Highland spinning

I’ve been a bit grotty – an excess of winter, really – but am now on the mend and distracting myself. Instead of doing something really necessary like – oh, please – housework, this has taken the form of rifling through my bookshelves. I need to do some culling, you see. If I’m to fit any more in.

Every so often you open a book which has lurked on your shelves for a while, and think ‘time for the charity shop’. And then you leaf through it more thoroughly and discover something which makes you change your mind. I’m not entirely sure whether an old book on a Victorian lady photographer will make it back onto my shelves; for one thing, I’m not particularly sympathetic to the subject, M E M Donaldson. But it just might, because of some of her subjects…

(I apologise for the quality; I couldn’t find the shots I wanted online, and had to photograph the book.) Note the sack of fleece behind the spinner, too. I’ve got several of those awaiting attention myself.

M E M Donaldson, photographer and writer, was an interesting character, but I don’t find her particularly appealing. I do find her books (now out of print) flowery, largely unreadable and prejudiced, and her representation of accents uncomfortable: ‘Ta way you wass pulling wass ass peautiful ass efer I did see before anywhere whatefer!‘ She was fascinated by Scottish religious history, and from a quite dogmatic point of view; she was deeply proud of her clan affiliations whereas I’m too cynical about the clearances (and many other things) to have any faith in the mystic power of a clan chief or crest; and she had a great hankering for the ‘king over the water’ – anathema to my rebel heart.

But she was quite a rebel herself, in her way. For one thing, she spent her life with her – now, let’s see, how is she described? – her ‘friend and companion’, Isabel Bonus. For another, she was undoubtedly intrepid for her time and social class, taking off and dragging her photographic equipment behind her over hill and down dale in a trolley contraption she created and named the ‘Green Maria’. And, in an early foretaste of current trends, she created her own Grand Design: the home she built on the Ardnamurchan peninsula in the late 1920s (it burned down twenty years later).

Born in London – more accurately, in Croydon (I know, I know – would she have been so romantic about the Highlands if she’d been brought up there?) – to a wealthy Presbyterian family in 1876, she died in Edinburgh as recently as 1958. This shocked me slightly, as her photographs seem to belong to a much older world.

They are undoubtedly posed, but they still give a vivid impression of rural life in the early years of the twentieth century, and I am convinced that most male photographers would not have been as interested in domestic minutiae and specifically in the preparation of fibre, from carding and spinning to winding wool and knitting.

Knitters do crop up in early photographs, and quite regularly – think Frank Meadow Sutcliffe on the north Yorkshire coast, or the many photographers of Shetland life – and so, not quite so often, do spinners. Donaldson photographed both.

(I do like the little girl playing with the fibre in this shot from ‘about 1905’, engrossed in what her grandmother is doing on her Saxony wheel.)

But ‘herself’, as Donaldson was sometimes known, also bothered to take a photograph of someone carding:

and, a considerably later stage in the process, of the same woman winding wool on a crois thachrais, a winder with revolving arms for holding the skein set on a three-legged stand. A very similar wool winder is illustrated in L F Grant’s Highland Folk Ways, where it is described as ‘primitive’, but then the base does seem to be an old tree stump. If it works, it works:

and I’m fascinated by it, as it so clearly almost exactly the same as the one in Grant’s book. The skein is held in place by angled pegs and I’d assumed they would hold it taut, but that doesn’t seem to be necessary. Perhaps because the pegs are so long?

The ultimate posed photo, though, added dyeing to the mix and involved the whole family:

Grandma spinning, aided by the ubiquitous curious child; mother, knitting behind her; and the other children, incongruously dressed in their very best clothes, gathered around a ‘dye tub’. It’s not very big, and that’s backed up by Grant in her Highland Folk Ways. She states that it was usual for the raw wool to be dyed, rather than the finished fabric, and speculates that one of the reasons for the popularity of checked fabric was the relative smallness of the dye tubs. It would be impossible to match large quantities of colours precisely, and in a checked fabric an accurate colour match is not essential.

What was in the dye tub in the photograph, I wonder? Crotal, the rock lichen which gives a reddish brown? Peat soot, boiled in a bag and ‘much used for olive brown’? Alas, Donaldon’s interest didn’t extend to investigating that – or maybe the shot was so posed that there was nothing whatsoever in the tub. Perhaps the children’s Sunday best was under no threat at all…

So does the book go back on the shelf? I’m still not sure…

Alarming cross-dressing, traditional costume – and knitting…

I was at a friend’s house earlier, enjoying a cuppa and a biscuit, when she pulled out a small book. ‘Take a look at this,’ she said, putting the book on my lap and carefully avoiding the sadly starving collie who was begging for gingernuts. ‘It should interest you, there’s knitting.’

When you have any links to Wales, you do get used to the jokes. A friend of mine was a stand up comic in London during the early 90s and regularly came on stage to a chorus of bleating, and there are whole websites devoted to sheep jokes and the Welsh. It’s all crap, of course, but sometimes… well, let’s just say the cause of high Cymric seriousness is undermined from within.

This is the sort of thing that went on before people had televisions to accompany their knitting. And there are some who think their introduction was a bad thing.

All the caption (in Welsh) does is identify the people involved, and I shall spare any existing relatives full identification; anyway, there are no ‘surnames’ as such, just last names formed by where they lived, as is quite usual. We have Jack, Howell, Richard and Tom, Tom being the one sock knitting in the front (I think). They look like a lively group of lads, and not unlike some of my friends from round here today. Why two of them should have succumbed to the call of their feminine sides I have no idea, but I reckon this is the best use of traditional dress I’ve seen in a long time. I should really have saved it for Gwyl Dewi Sant (St David’s Day)…

On a more serious note, this is before World War One. I must check the names on the war memorial; far too many young men from round here died on the Western Front. I do hope Jack, Howell, Richard and Tom were not among them.

(Photograph from Hên Dref Harlech a Phentre Llanfair, by Dr Lewis Lloyd and Martin Eckley)

Stupid rookie mistakes…

I am not new to knitting. All right, I didn’t start when I was four, but I have been knitting for a fair few years now. I am not new to working with yarn which is unusual and a bit different. Maybe even hand-dyed.

I always seem to be called to yarn which reflects the landscape, though I guess that could apply to any colour if you searched long enough. In this particular case, it’s a grey. Grey of the storms over Cardigan Bay.

It’s lovely yarn, merino, and tweedy.

One from Queensland Yarns, bought (as usual for me) in a sale. That’s no excuse for what I have done. There are no dye lots with this yarn, and when I bought it I was careful to select five skeins which were as close in terms of colour matching as possible. I’m used to knitting with yarn like this, alternating it so that the colour appears to blend.

Stormclouds, however, have gathered.

First, I forgot about the alternating.

Second, I had obviously checked the colours in artificial light. In natural light they are radically different. Even had I remembered to alternate the skeins, there is no way they would have blended together.

Thirdly, I am knitting a very plain funnel-neck sweater. There are no elaborate stitch patterns (I can’t look up and down at a chart at present) or other colours to distract the eye.

Fourthly, I had almost finished the back before I realised this. It’s still on the needles because I can’t bear to frog it.

I am now channelling Father Jack – well, except for ‘gurrrls’. Drink. Feck. Arse.

So the question is, exactly how silly would my sweater look with back, front, right and left sleeves and welts (plus polo neck) in slightly different colours? Could I make it look deliberate, inspired even? Or would it just look like shite?

That would be an ecumenical matter.

I can say no more.

Winter walk

I was going to do a review of the woolly year, and then I decided it had been just too patchy. No trips to Shetland, unlike 2010; instead I started it unwell, finished it unwell (with the same thing, and if anyone reading this is diagnosed with BPPV, benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, is offered treatment and thinks ‘nah, it’ll go away, anyway’ – don’t fool yourself: like Arnie, it will be back, and will be much more of a bastard to shift), and took in a hand op along the way. So I’m not dwelling on last year. It’s gone.

Time to look ahead.

And, amazingly, the rain was gone too, yesterday, for a brief spell. So I put my work and my knitting aside, got on my boots and walked up the hill to check that a friend’s house hadn’t been flooded during her absence. Water was running down the sides of the lane, and occasionally across it, but it had stopped raining.

The domed hill behind us is called Moelfre. ‘Moel’ translates as ‘bald’ – no surprises there.

The whole landscape is littered with Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age remains and several of them do seem to be aligned with Moelfre, so my betting is that whatever vegetation covered the slopes in the past – few pollen studies have been done, unfortunately, the whole area is begging for more investigation – the top was just as visible then as it is now.

More recently, drovers’ roads criss-crossed the area. One went up the hill here, then joined others winding round the base of Moelfre. You can still walk whole parts of the ‘roads’, following clear trails and passing from one stopping point to another. These can be identified by the Scots Pines; according to one source the changing number of trees delivered different messages: ‘bedding and fodder for men and beasts’, ‘fodder for animals only’, ‘watering point’. And these wandering trails led thousands and thousands of beasts – and their accompanying humans – all the way to from Cardigan Bay to Smithfield and the London meat markets for hundreds of years.

But I was on a checking-up mission. No drovers’ road for me; probably just as well – they’re not tarmacked unless a modern lane overlies them, and the ground was very, very squishy. Can’t think why. I wandered round the house making sure that none of the nearby springs had burst their banks, and then I started colour spotting:

I am so easily distracted from the path of doing what I should be doing, or perhaps I was just overexcited by the sunshine. I love these colours, and I love the old stonework. One rule of thumb with trying to date houses round here is that the larger the base stones, the older the house. Some of the stones in the walls of this house are massive.

And then I became distracted by some nearby barns. Again the colours of the local stone, not to mention the local slate, call to me.

Even I, fascinated as I was, couldn’t fail to notice the disappearance of the unfamiliar big yellow thing in the sky. I took one last look inland, decided I’d better finish doing what I came to do and then beat a hasty retreat.

Those are Welsh Mountains, they’re tough. Unlike me – house fine, time to go back, finish my work and settle down with the knitting and a good film. At least there was some let-up in the weather for the start of 2013, and once the stove is lit and the kettle is boiled… I’d still like a little more sun, though.

Whatever you’re doing to mark the change of the year – if anything, of course – enjoy it. And may 2013 be a corker for all of us!

Sheep at the solstice (or almost)

It’s completely miserable, with rain and/or heavy, blurring mist. I’m lighting the stove earlier and earlier and indulging in the midwinter ‘let’s bring the sun back by much swearing’ festival – trying to work out which ******** bulb has gone and taken out a great section of Christmas lights. At least some traditional decorations don’t need them:

(One of my collection of santons, traditional terracotta figures from a Provencal crib, representing all the workers of a village. Oh, and the Holy Family, but my entire family are tout à fait laïque and include a hotch-potch of potential religious traditions, so we don’t have them.)

Always one to be distracted from the path of righteousness and going up in the loft to find out if there are any spare bulbs anywhere, I resorted to the bookshelves in search of distraction, and found it in Henry Moore’s Sheep Sketchbook. I’ve always loved Moore’s work, both sculpture and sketching, and it’s probably no surprise that he had a fondness for sheep. Here he is, with sheep, and with his Sheep Piece in the background (‘I’ve always liked sheep, and there is one big sculpture of mine that I call Sheep Piece because I placed it in a field and the sheep enjoyed it and the lambs played around it,’):

(photograph, 1977: Henry Moore Foundation)

So I spent a happy half-hour smiling at his drawings of his neighbours. He was preparing for a huge exhibition in Florence in ’72, with packers and shippers milling about, and couldn’t work in all the chaos. So he slipped out to a small studio facing onto a field which he let to a local farmer for grazing. The sheep often pottered up to the window,

and Moore began to find them fascinating (no, not like that, for heaven’s sake).

He admits that ‘at first I saw them as rather shapeless balls of wool with a head and four legs’, but that didn’t last long. The sheep soon began to work on him, as sheep do when you spend time with them. ‘Then,’ he writes, ‘I began to realise that underneath all that wool was a body which moved in its own way, and that each sheep had its individual character.’

I’ll say:

Drawing them was comparatively straightforward – if Moore tapped on the studio window, the sheep would turn and stare back, often staying in one position for about five minutes; they’d also stay put – sometimes – if he tapped on the window again. Quite well behaved for artist’s models, then. As he became more involved, he would work up his sketches in the evenings, or even do further ones from memory.

All the packing was completed, but Moore continued drawing the sheep. Lambing had begun, and ‘…there in front of me was the mother-and-child theme.’ It’s a repeated feature of his work: ‘the large form related to the small form and protecting it, or the complete dependance of the small form on the large form’. Quite.

Moore’s real affection for his models comes through especially clearly in his drawings of ewes and lambs, and he gets some of that enthusiasm and vigour, the way a lamb can almost lift – no, can actually lift – its mum off her back feet as it charges in for a drink, for all the world like Father Jack scenting alcohol on the wind. The technique – using a ball-point pen, sometimes with a black felt pen for emphasis or shading, and occasionally with a watercolour wash – seems to me to get the texture and feel of the sheep perfectly (I’m particularly impressed with the way he renders their faces).

And not just their faces…

So I’ll end with this one, which Moore had intended to be the last (it wasn’t; he couldn’t stop). However you celebrate the season, have a good time, and

NADOLIG LLAWEN, HAPPY CHRISTMAS, JOYEUX NOEL!

Anyone got any spare bulbs for a long string of Habitat lights, pink and red, very pretty? No? It’s the loft, then…

Summertime, and the shoulders are silly…

I’ve been trying to find something I can knit, given that because of my BPPV – positional vertigo – I can’t keep looking up and down at a pattern at the moment. Something plain vanilla. Something, in essence, boring. But useful. And not unattractive. I’ve got the yarn ready,

a rather lovely soft DK tweed from Queensland yarns.

In quest of this ideal project, which is proving difficult to find, I resorted to the Giant Pattern Mountain. The more recent are in my library on Ravelry, which makes hunting down patterns very easy as you can search by pattern type, yardage (OK, meterage), yarn weight. But it’s not as much fun as scrabbling through heaps of yellowing pattern books, even if you know there is not the slightest chance that you’ll find anything appropriate when you do so. My eighties horrors were to hand (I wrote about them a while ago, they just haven’t found their way back into the loft), and I became distracted with thoughts of summer. Not hard: it’s pouring down…

And if you thought shoulder pads couldn’t possibly have played a significant part in a sleeveless summer garment, you were wrong.

If possible, they make you look even more deformed than they do when used in winter garments, with sticky little arms peeping out, apparently originating halfway along the shoulders rather than at the end. I cannot, seriously, believe that anyone ever knitted these.

Or did they? I mean, the yarn companies wouldn’t have wasted so much time and energy developing, designing, writing, testing, grading all these patterns if they though no one would ever buy the yarn and knit them up. Would they?

These seem deliberately designed to give an increasingly clichéd masculine profile. Of course, that’s true of all the shoulder-pad-infested 80s clothing, but here it’s strikingly obvious – especially in the case of the woman on the right with the tight skirt. Why did women do this? I suppose the same question could have been asked of flappers in the 1920s, and the answers are many and probably deserving of academic investigation (ah – now I know what to do for my doctorate: only joking). And yet they are combined with some femininity – lace patterns, pastel colours, no assertive musculature – just to reassure the chaps that the women are only playing. It’s OK, boys, we’re not serious.

(This would have been about the time that I was told I couldn’t join a BBC training course to be cameraman because I was female. Technical things? Oh, don’t bother your pretty little head about those. We’d like you to join us in another capacity, after all, you’re Oxbridge – you don’t want to be associating with nasty rough things like heavy equipment and cameramen. This is an edited version – barely edited; I was incandescent but there was nowhere to go.)

OK, rant over. Now, as we all know, the French reputation is for chic fashionability. As a half-Frog, this has always baffled me a bit: one trip to a supermarket somewhere in the Pas de Calais should lay that one to rest for ever. And so should this:

It’s an extreme example of the little-sticky-arms-and massive-shouder-pads genre. And what the hell is all that netting clutched at crotch level all about? Why do you need netting when you’re clearly on a beach or harbour somewhere (and it’s not that sort of netting; this is Strictly netting, not ‘arr, we’re bringing the catch in, cap’n’ netting, can’t see the fishing fleet being very effective when armed with that stuff).

After all the girly pallor it’s no surprise, really, that I became distracted by thoughts of colour. Easily distracted. A sudden outbreak of colour. Colour and – of course – intarsia.

Only, dear Lord, thoughts. Why? Why?

(Hmm. Ironic, retro, maybe I’m beginning to see why from the perspective of now, but… no, it’s not my plain vanilla. And it’s December. And it wouldn’t work in my Queensland tweed.) Right, back to the search…

Book Review: Cast On, Bind Off

We all get terribly stuck in ruts, so I was very pleased to be sent a book for review: Cast On, Bind Off: 54 Step-by-Step Methods by Leslie Ann Bestor. I’m hoping it might broaden my horizons…

That’s because my own particular rut is a very emphatic one. I cast on in one way, have done for years, and – rather daringly – have just added a second cast off (I can’t quite bring myself to call it a ‘bind off’) to the one I usually use. I know, it’s ridiculous.

Let’s tackle the cast-on question first. My mother taught me to do what I believe is a version of the long-tail, thumb, cast-on and I’ve passed it on to other people, but that’s it. I can’t be doing with anything else. Oh, I know: it’s not universally appropriate, but I like it and it does me. I don’t need to change, no way… Only, of course, I often do.

It’s a good cast-on, it’s a neat cast-on – once you come to terms with the fact that your first row of knitting will be a wrong-side row – but there are so many variations on a theme, so many which are more appropriate in some circumstances. This neat little book has made me realise just how narrow I have been. And it’s not just about the purely functional: choosing a tight or loose cast on according to what I’m knitting (they’re divided into functional groups for ease of use). It’s also about some really interesting decorative possibilities.

I am a complete numpty when it comes to following instructions (as the members of my knitting group can attest after the trauma of the Dreadful Crochet Instruction evening, which left everyone horribly scarred). But I can follow these, and there’s a great incentive, especially when it comes to multicoloured cast-ons:

How cute is that? And it really works, too.

The range is eclectic, and covers some regional variants such as the Channel Islands cast-on (in the first dps above), which is made with an extra strand of yarn and holds up well. There are some really clear instructions for a moebius cast-on, and I’ve managed that too: another thing I’d had a wild but unsatisfactory stab at until now.

The bind-offs (oh, I give up) are equally excellent, and I’ve been playing around with the picot ones. It’s taken me some time to get them right, but I cracked it in the end; as you can tell, the illustrations are excellent. And even this numpty can follow them.

Ah yes, that brings me to another book I’ve been sent. I’m going to have to pass this one on to one of my friends for feedback because the Dreadful Crochet Instruction evening was a complete disaster as well as dreadful. I can’t crochet. Having seen this, though, I’m more motivated to learn. It’s by Edie Eckman, and some of these motifs are absolutely gorgeous.

The only problem is that if I dare to mention that I might vaguely, possibly, just perhaps like to have another go at learning to crochet, all my friends will leave the country. It’ll be like the mass Boxing-Day-swim scenes on our beach, only they won’t stop to change their clothes first.

Sunday, (not) spinning and an unusually agressive robin

Every third Sunday in the month a group of spinners – we’ve been just two, and we’ve been about fifteen in number – meet, informally, in Dolgellau. My route there is along one of the most beautiful roads I know, running beside the Mawddach estuary:

It’s a pleasure to drive it. Well, at some times of the year. Not when you’re behind four caravans, three motor homes and have a suicidal middle-aged biker attempting to overtake all the queue in one go. (The nurses in A&E at one local hospital have a name for the bikers: organ donors – just saying.)

At this time of year, though, the road is quiet and the colours are amazing.

And the venue is a great one, as well:

A rather lovely cafe, once a hardware shop, with a spacious upper room and excellent cheese scones. And cake. And lemon meringue pie. And flapjacks to die for. And very good coffee. And a truly enormous range of herb teas and tisanes. Did I mention the lemon meringue pie?

The cafe isn’t the only thing to tempt us, either, because we are the Sunday Market Spinners. We meet on the third Sunday for a good reason – it’s the farmers’ market too. And I just have to pick up a monthly treat – a bar from Cariad Chocolates. Someone was buying up the stall, but I did manage to get my paws on a dark chocolate with salted caramel.

(I’m sure the rucksack wasn’t only for chocolate.)

This Sunday I couldn’t spin (well, I could spin, but not with a wheel, my BPPV – benign paroxysmal positional vertigo – is not good), so I took my knitting. But I couldn’t look down to knit without incurring more dizziness, so I didn’t stay very long – it was good to have the company, but all those rotating wheeeeeeeee…. no.

And it just made me envious, anyway. I’ve almost finished spinning a Shetland fleece of passing loveliness, and I want to get on with the Christmas knitting, but I couldn’t. I know the vertigo will pass, but there’s no point pushing it too much. So I took an earlier-than-usual trip back, and stopped off in a layby beside the estuary to take a few more photographs of the glorious autumn colour. It really has been quite exceptional for us this year.

Gradually I became aware that I was attracting some unwelcome attention. From something, oh, about 10cm long. A robin. A robin which definitely and emphatically wanted me gone.

It was shouting at me from the fence and then it hopped down onto the ground and made little runs in my direction, getting quite close. More unnerving was when it took off and flew straight at me, instantly giving me Hitchcockian visions. Rather wimpishly, I retreated to the car, where I sat for a moment wondering about exactly what had happened, and why it had happened. I put my camera away and got out of the car again to make sure I hadn’t imagined it, and that it wasn’t a one-off. And the robin did it again – flying straight towards my face, almost hovering (I didn’t realise robins could do that), frantically fanning its wings. I wear glasses – perhaps it had seen its reflection in the lenses and thought there was another robin there? So, a little nervously, I went back and took my specs off, then carefully approached the robin again. And it did it a third time, though it flew back to the fence when I moved forwards. At this I decided that I was just stressing it out too much, and left; I’d got my shots anyway.

Now this isn’t entirely unheard of; in fact, there’s a discussion here about it, in which it was concluded that the robin concerned had probably seen its reflection in a camera lens. But when the layby robin made its second flight at me, I wasn’t using my camera; the lens was covered. And when it went after me the third time, I wasn’t even wearing my glasses. I’m used to aggressive robins in my own garden – for a while we had the top garden robin and the bottom garden robin, and they used to meet in the middle garden and yell at each other. But I’ve never experienced anything like this. Most peculiar. Psycho killer Mawddach robins.

At least I’d got my chocolate to console me and more beautiful, if rather chilly, views.

What a surreal Sunday. No spinning, but spooked by a robin. A robin, for heaven’s sake. The things that pose on Christmas cards, carrying mistletoe in their beaks. Probably holding it so they can ram it in someone’s eye. From now on, I shall think of all robins as being drunken thugs and possibly also Glaswegian – ma’ layby, see you, Jimmy…

‘Keep the maids at their spinning…’

Every so often it really hits me. While I spin for pleasure (which I sometimes forget, especially when I’m up to my arms in daggy fleece), throughout most of spinning history that would not have been the case. People may have got pleasure out of it, but it was a job. And it could be a wearisome one, too.

I know it’s obvious, but it’s just slapped me in the face again. Before industrialization every thread for every textile had to be spun. Every thread – and before the spinning wheel, that meant spindle-spun. And not just clothing or household textiles. Sails for Viking longboats? Made from handspun.

But it doesn’t often get much of a mention; spinning and even textiles tend to crop up as a footnote or an aside, even in original sources. And once these have passed though the filter of an academic historian (often a bloke, and/or someone uninterested in domestic history), they are even less likely to leap out of the past. But sometimes they still do. In the records of St Bartholemew’s Hospital in Elizabethan London, for example.

Taken over by the City following the dissolution of the religious orders, there were twelve ‘sisters’ there: nursing staff (the name ‘sister’ was a hang over from the earlier, religious-order days). Their duties were documented and not that different in some respects from how you would hope nurses behave now – helping their patients, giving them food and drink, making sure they were comfortable. But in their spare moments (!) wool and flax was issued by the matron (‘the chief governess … of this house’) for them to spin up. It was woven, but by an outsider, into blankets and sheets for the hospital.

On a smaller scale, households were expected to produce their own textiles, even if they were actually woven, sometimes, by a specialist. I knew about this truly domestic spinning (the ‘domestic system’ was something else entirely). For instance, it often crops up in fairy tales, even local folk tales like the story of Eilian, where the unusual new maid doesn’t join her colleagues spinning by the fire but prefers to go out and spin in a field where the Fair Folk dance. In my mind, though, I’d somehow thought that this evening spinning would be sociable and pleasurable – and it may well have been a great opportunity for gossip and chat – as well as a time when the maids could spin thread for their own use.

How naive of me…

I’ve been reading – not rereading, to my shame – Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett. For anyone who is in the same position as I was and who hasn’t read it, it’s essentially the story of a journey around (contemporary) eighteenth-century Britain undertaken by Squire Bramble and his family. It’s told in a series of letters, and it’s a hoot.

Some of the letters are ‘written’ by Tabitha, the Squire’s maiden sister, and their target is the housekeeper back in Wales. Tabitha repeatedly urges Mrs Gwyllim to ‘have an eye to the maids and keep them at their spinning – I think they may go very well without beer in hot weather – it serves only to inflame the blood and set them a-gog after the men’. (Oh, all right, the latter part has little to do with spinning, but I couldn’t resist it.)

But it was later on that it hit me. The maids weren’t just sitting around the place spinning, drinking beer and chasing after men. In their ‘free’ time they were producing the household textiles:

‘I hope there will be twenty stun of cheese ready for market by the time I get huom, and as much owl spun as will make half a dozen pair of blankets…’

Tabitha’s eccentric spelling is deliberate, but that’s a hell of a lot of thread those maids were expected to produce; no wonder she didn’t want them distracted by alcohol and the opposite sex. In the ‘domestic system’ (of which, doubtless, more in a later post) it could take several spinners to keep pace with a single weaver; Tabitha Bramble’s maids wouldn’t have had much time for beer and boys if she wanted her ‘half a dozen pair’ ready for her return. Industrialization, just gathering steam (literally) when Smollett was writing, must have made an immediate difference to the life of the spinning maids. But their employers would undoubtedly find something else for them to do with their time – something that didn’t involve ale and unsuitable men either, no doubt.

Revenge of the shoulder pad

I accepted a challenge, and it’s all my own fault. It’s even my own challenge. After my post on incredibly tasteful 1970s patterns, and encouraged by Heike at Made With Loops, I climbed the loft ladder of fate. There’s a trunk up there with fleece in it (what a shock and surprise, however did that get there?), and under the fleece is my stash of late 1980s pattern books.

Serendipitously, the first ones I uncovered were seasonally apt:

Oh, no it isn’t.

They’re French in origin, and the translation isn’t quite as smooth as you’d expect (‘sports out fits’ and a big cardigan in what is off-puttingly but probably accurately described as ‘hairy’ yarn). They’re generally Phildar and Pingouin, though I did buy others whenever I was in France. In the UK, the choice was by and large locked in the 70s, and I’d not heard of Rowan. I was a new knitter and I wanted something a little more age-appropriate than giant crew-neck sweaters with intarsia cats sprawling on them.

Though perhaps not anything like this:

which wouldn’t really have matched my lifestyle in the slightest (plus, I would have had no idea where to find a small child, clearly a vital accessory). I think he looks quite sanguine, considering he’s been kidnapped by the Yummy Mummies from Hell outside the Louvre – I’m sure I recognise those railings. He may, of course, be a dummy; I’m not sure the pose is very natural… And why the orange tights? It was the late 80s, not 1962, and even I wore tights sometimes. I know you could get colours other than American Tan on Acid.

But it’s not just the orange tights, it’s the…

Agh!

Overwhelmingly, the impression is that women the whole world over had suddenly started playing American football. I’ve been reading up on this a little, because I was immune to the call of the shoulder pad (they were Dynasty rather than Dracula), and the general concensus of opinion is that they began to appear early in the ’80s as an hommage to the fashions of the 1940s, but got worse and worse – or better and better, I suppose, depending on your outlook – as the decade wore on. They are also repeatedly voted ‘most revolting 1980s fashion trend’, and I can quite believe it.

There was the sequential shoulder pad problem to contend with, too. I had a friend who was an apprentice hot-shot lawyer (I know, I’m sorry), and she really suffered. You have shoulder pads in your blouse, then more in your jacket, and then you put on a coat with shoulder pads – and then you get stuck in doorways while your bookish Goth friend is falling off a bar stool laughing like a drain.

And since the Goth thing has raised its ugly head – or maybe that should be a scrawny, skeletal hand – what the hell is going on here?

You might have expected me to like this ‘story’, given the preponderance of black and glitter, but I was brought up short by the balaclava. I remember quite clearly being aghast at this when I opened the pattern book all those years ago, and me and my gay mate who ran the wool shop had a good laugh about it (he voted for a bondage vibe and I reckoned it was an all-body suit, also involving gloves). That, of course, doesn’t exclude his bondage idea.

But the shoulder pads are sadly reduced, so let’s get back to normal:

It doesn’t even look as though it fits (bet it was acrylic as well – yummy). You must have needed a lot more yarn to accommodate those serious shoulders, but they’re not the biggest in the books. That honour has to belong to:

Tah dah!

The sad thing is, this is actually quite a nice jacket. In search of a serious restyle, I’m afraid – but that brings me to why I hang on to some of these: ideas. Ideas and stitch patterns. It’s a basic stitch pattern, but I like it; I even like the turned-back cuffs, the wrap-over front and the raglan sleeves. Obviously the inflated pillows attached to each shoulder can go, but some day I might find parts of it useful – though I’d have to reduce the shoulder measurement by several metres if I ever thought of knitting it up as such.

And I might just find a reason to look at this combination of stitch patterns, too,

though hopefully without the distorting shoulder pads, pinched waist and scare-’em-off-the-ski-slopes sunglasses. Or the bandaged head and the frankly worrying white gloves… and yet again the strange headgear. I was alive then, I know I was. I cannot remember anyone, even my legal friend, wearing anything on/around their head that looked like this.

But the prize has to belong to this tasty selection:

No comment, really. What could possibly beat the caption?