War-time knits and Innocent hats.

It’s been more a week of discovery than actual knitting, but just as much fun nonetheless. I stumbled across a collection of old war time knitting patterns this week that I had been given a few years ago by my friend Nicky and I’ve had a great time looking through them again and uncovering some great pattern ideas and some insightful articles about the war-time woman.

 

 These ideas for Christmas patterns could be in a knitting magazine now.

I just thought this was a beautiful and classic picture. 

There was a series on the BBC recently called ‘The Fabric of Britain’ which looked at the history of British knitting and touched on the importance of it during the war. Not only providing supplies of socks and scarves to the troops but also having the ability to create new clothing from worn out pieces, which is why the fashion for shorter cardigans and tighter jumpers took off through the war as there was simply less wool as you recycled an old jumper again and again.

I love these children’s patterns. I’d like to try converting this girl's cardigan up to my size purely for the shoulders, I've been trying to find a modern pattern like this for a while now.

They obviously didn’t scare easily back in the 40’s, as some of the children are terrifying.

This fringe article was on the back of a knitting pattern from 1943 titled “Even in War-time you’ll long for a new hat when thinking of spring”.

I Just like picturing this woman steaming her brown bread, wearing her fur collar and sipping a Martini.

After removing my fur collar and putting down my Martini I did manage to do a little knitting myself this week.

I thought I would try my hand at knitting some hats for the ‘Innocent big knit’. You may have seen the adverts on TV. They put the hats on the little bottles of smoothies and money from the sales goes to keeping older people warm this winter. They are really fun to make and there are patterns to follow on their website http://thebigknit.co.uk/join-in. You maybe able to tell that I came up with the rabbit hat as I went along, Which is all part of the fun of it. I just hope someone will take pity on his terrified little face.

And of course we just couldn’t resist this.

Happy knitting!