A ten minute blog

I’ve had a page of prompts, one for every day of the year to ensure that I blog more frequently, if not every day. The prompt for today is this:

Ready, set, go

Set a timer for ten minutes. Open a new post. Start the timer, and start writing. When the timer goes off, publish.

So this is it:

The exhibition that I’ve been working on for nearly a year went live last week and was launched at Vogue Knitting Live in New York last weekend. The exhibition is about Sanquhar gloves and brings together a lot of information about them in one place. The link is here:

It has been organised by the Center for Knit and Crochet in the USA and co-curated by me and Beth Brown-Reinsel. The web work and the launch has been done by the CKC and it looks fantastic. I hope you go to have a look at it.

New Duke pattern being knitted

I’ve been working on an exhibition about Sanquhar gloves (will tell more when it’s further on) and realised that I have only knitted one pair of Duke gloves. I wanted to explore the construction further and test the various written instructions about a year ago and got them all together:

The People’s Friend version (2, The Scottish Knitting Book and the Sanquhar Knitting book) from the mid 1950s

The Patons & Baldwins version, again from the mid 50s

and the SWRI version, I think from the 60s.

Then there’s the charted one from a Japanese web site.

They are all slightly different from each other – for instance the P & B pattern specifies 2 ply wool while the others say 3 ply and some have the thumb set at the start of the round (P & B) while some (People’s Friend) have it in the middle.

Here’s what I’ve done so far: and it’s only going to be one glove!

The pattern is a copy of the one that I have had in my personal collection for many years but we also have it in the collection of the KCG.

Patons & Baldwins Duke glove

It’s coming out very small – vintage 2 ply pure wool and 1.5mm (old 15/16uk needles) mean that it is barely adult size. Were people’s hands smaller 50 years ago?