Completely Original, or Humoring the Young in 1972
This booklet from 1972 teaches the basics of knitting and then offers a set of easy patterns which claimed to allow you to creating “something useful, exciting, and completely original.” Of course, your creations were not completely original as the author, Virginia Hillway Buxton had written the patterns. True, your choice of yarn and color might create something unique, but you were working from her directions entirely.
Knitting books from earlier eras often explained that a knitter could take any stitch pattern, calculate how to use it to make a unique version of the garment patterns offered up. Which mean the maker chose was yarn and color, and stitch pattern. This would make for 1 more important original element than anyone was suggesting in 1972, so why all this talk about originality then? And some of the more technical books from the early 20th century taught the principles of creating a knitting pattern. Now that would be completely original.
Although knitting patterns were becoming on the whole simpler in the 1960s and 1970s--increasing use of worsted and bulky yarns, of basic stitch patterns, and basic garment designs--marketers appealed to the younger and newer knitters (like their counterparts among dressmakers) as special individuals creating in whole new ways. For example, one sewing book was entitled Make it Your Way as if women hadn’t been doing that for decades. They had, but no one seemed to feel the need to re-assure them of that. Making the Baby Boomers feel special about their creations must have paid off for marketers as a way to sell them more stuff, or it wouldn’t have happened so often.
