Old Knitting Books

I recently got this knitting and crocheting book at the Book Mill. It was published in the 1940s.



When I was looking through it, I was struck by how the illustrations for knitting books looked back then. The stuff they showed looked less perfect than the items in my modern knitting books. It looked more like how things really look after you hand knit them. All the pictures were black and white, which nowadays you really would never see. This image of a cute little girl in woolens holding her kitten by its neck was particularly hilarious:



But then I decided to pull out some of my modern knitting books to compare, and I discovered that the photos illustrating some of these are also fairly freaky. This are from Loop de Loop, which I bought mainly because it was on sale. They seem to have been trying to go for some kind of moody arty vibe with their illustrations.

This is the best weird image of the bunch, but there are several others in the book where the adults posing with children seem to be angry, resentful, psychotic, or suicidal.



Just put the child down. Slowly. Slowly.

Jason's Birthday Hat

This is the hat I made for Jason for his birthday. He ripped off the tassle. Looks good with the spikey nubbin.

First Mittens

I recently knit my first pair of mittens. Mittens are so quick to knit and so easy, I knit three! Actually, I didn't knit three because it was so fun. I knit three because I messed up the increases on the first one and it was so much uglier than the second one that I felt obligated to make a replacement.



There is a trick to making pretty increases that I had forgotten. When you increase, to avoid having big, gaping holes where you did your increases, you have to knit through the back of the loop, to twist the hole closed. You don't see holes in my ugly mitten because I went in and darned them closed. But it still looks lumpy and ugly.



I knit these with double strands of yarn. One yellow and one cream-colored. The pattern of which color shows is completely random. I did the thumbs a different color under Vigo's design guidance. You might also notice that one of the mittens has a longer cuff than the others. That's because I was daydreaming.

To make these mittens, I used the recipe from Knitty. I love their basic recipes.

Socks for Vigo

I have been knitting a fair amount lately. I have a couple sweaters I'm working on. One of them is stalled because I can't for the life of me understand the pattern and the other because I had to roll a skein of yarn into a ball before continuing and it completely threw me off track.

But, with the sweaters stalled, I knit those two hats and a pair of socks for Vigo, and I also just finished my first pair of mittens, also for Vigo. (Picture coming soon).

Vigo chose this yarn for socks about two years ago, so it's about time I got around to knitting them. It's some of that miraculous self-patterning yarn. I don't know if you can tell in the photo, but it has strands of metallic silver running through it.