#woolyknit

It's a little old fashioned I know, but I still knit many of my own garments and some for my husband. When I was expecting and my children were little, I knitted baby clothes.

Knitting as a cottage craft is something that households have done for hundreds of years. Initially it was a way of saving money for cash strapped households. These days, cheap knitwear from synthetic yarns is everywhere, most of it worn for only a short while then discarded. Time was however, that most knitted garments were woolen and lasted ages. When I was a girl at school in the 80s, many of us wore grey wool knitted cardis that kept us warm on frosty Winter days. Our mothers taught us to knit. It helped entertain us on boring wet days and kept us occupied (no devices or internet back in the 80s (unless you were an absolute geek with a Sinclair Spectrum!). My first knitting project as a child, tutored by my mother was a wool cardigan for school! I remember going with her to buy the wool; wool that had been spun locally by Poppleton's Mill in the small town where we lived, nestled in the South Pennines.

The South Pennines are wool central. Sheep graze the hills and wool spinning mills abound. Going to school, we took baskets with our wool and our projects with us so we could knit on the bus or at playtime. Girls magazines then often carried free patterns for anything from crazy hats and scarves to tank tops.

If you knit in wool, you will create a warm garment that will last for years. You will soon end up, as I have with a collection of knitting needles and a rag bag of left over balls and skeins of wool. They match the garments you knitted, perfectly. If you're mother taught you to darn, as mine did, you will also be able to skillfully mend your jumpers when they eventually wear in holes. You can even unravel them and create new designs (this is how we did recycle-reuse back in the 80s!

Back during Covid I started knitting in earnest again and this warm jacket was the result.

I still have it. It is thick and warm for Winter firesides and walks. Later, I added a hood. My husband calls it my 'Little Red Riding Hood' jacket! At the same time I made him a thick sweater too, using this lovely stitch:

All the wool pictured comes from Woolyknit in the village of Diggle, high in the Pennines (Yes that is really its name - it lies adjactent to Delph and Dobcross!)

Maybe my blogpost might inspire you to start knitting too. I hope so. Or maybe you are into other sorts of old school crafting like crochet, scrapbooking or tie-dyeing. Please let me know.