There isn’t much that I can do in the garden at this time of the year so I usually take up my knitting needles in the winter. I used to be really good at it but I’m a bit rusty now and I’m trying to get back to where I was skill wise.

I’ve looked in the shops for nice big thick jumpers but I haven’t had much luck finding what I wanted. They’re often too short because when it’s cold I like my bahookie (bum) to be nicely covered. But this year the sleeves are a bit strange too. Why are they designing nice big pullovers with short sleeves or three-quarter length ones? I don’t know about you but I like to have warm arms. In the past the sleeves always used to be too long for me and they would flap past my hands. I think I have short arms, it was a problem when I tried to learn the violin too, well that’s my excuse! I thought I had found a nice looking woolly in TK Maxx but when I pulled it out to get a good look I discovered that it had only one sleeve! Where’s the point in that?

Anyway, I looked through my small stash of wool and decided to knit an old favourite of mine. As you can see by the dog-earedness of the pattern it has been well used over the years since I first knitted it in the 1970s when leg warmers were first in fashion. I never did knit those but I have done the hat.

I’ve used Wendy Dolce wool which is fluffy but isn’t itchy, I’ve used it before with this pattern and it works fine. So as you can see the back is nearly finished and it hasn’t taken long, the needles are quite thick which always helps. I’ll show you the finished article before Christmas – maybe!

In the 1970s there was quite a resurgence in craft work, it was all a bit hippy-ish I suppose. So knitting really took off again and I got right into the pointy sticks and became quite proficient at it.

My pride and joy was the Fair Isle jumper which I knitted for my husband around 1980 and it is still going strong after all these years of careful washing.

Fair Isle Jumper

So as you can see I wasn’t bad at knitting and the wool wasn’t too expensive then so I did quite a lot of it even although we were pretty skint (poor) back then.

Later on in the 80′s, the boys arrived with just 19 months in between them and as you can imagine there was quite a fair amount of cot blanket, bootees and matinee jacket knitting going on. Certainly for the first baby anyway – then a strange thing happened and my brain seemed to be – well I can only describe it as being ‘hijacked’, and suddenly I couldn’t concentrate on anything much beyond feeds and nappies. Our first boy hardly slept at all which didn’t help matters.

So boy number 2 hardly got anything knitted for him and the matinee jacket which I did manage is a very much plainer effort than his brother’s.

After that I just gave up for a long time and have only recently picked up the needles again, but I was really shocked to see how much knitting wool had gone up in price. I can understand that there are a lot of processes that a sheep fleece has to go through before you get to a ball of wool, but I know for a fact that the sheep farmers are getting pennies for the fleeces. It seems such a shame when they have all the hard work and worry of the sheep. In fact the farmers are being fleeced.

So what with me trying to tidy things up in the house and get rid of stuff or use it up in some way, I decided to knit with the left over bits of wool which have accumulated in various work baskets over the years. And as I’m trying to knit my way back up to Fair Isle and Aran standard again I decided to start back at the beginning with squares with a slight difference, just to make them a bit more interesting.

Wool Squares

These knitted shapes are actually described as “shells” and I found the pattern instructions in a 1940s knitting book called Modern Knitting Illustrated, which has patterns for everything that the well dressed war time person needed. Including knitted knickers (very itchy I imagine).

Use a size of needles which suits the left-over wool which you have and cast on 41 stitches and knit about 8 rows in garter stitch. Still working in garter stitch, knit 2 stitches together each side of the middle stitch, which you should mark to make life easier for you. I slip a safety pin onto the middle stitch which you can pull on to help you decide when you should be knitting 2 together. Knit the next row straight and continue in this way, decreasing in the middle of each alternate row until 3 stitches remain. Knit these 3 stitches together and fasten off.

The shells can then be sewn together to form a pattern or just randomly and it is more decorative than just plain squares.

I love everything about that era, well – obviously not the T.B., Diphtheria and Rickets sort of stuff, but you know what I mean.

The first building which I can remember seeing and thinking ‘art deco’ was The Midland Hotel in Morecambe. It was about 1969 and as I recall the hotel looked pretty sad and delapidated at that time. However it’s fab now – must have cost a fortune to refurbish it.

I saw the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea about 1979. Similar story there and I think it has been refurbished twice since then. That is the down side to art deco (modernist) buildings, if you don’t keep them looking really buffed, they quickly begin to look horrific.

The fashions looked wonderful too but definitely not for the heftier figure.

The posters were fantastic as well.

The 1938 Empire Exhibition was held in Glasgow. It is a city full of fashion conscious artistic people and by the look of things they really pulled out all the stops for it. It’s just a pity that the weather let them down – as usual.

But it didn’t stop the visitors, well after all, we aren’t made of sugar. Unfortunately most of the buildings were just temporary structures, so there isn’t much evidence of the exhibition now. I think it would be great if they would rebuild Tait’s Tower. Tait is more famous for having designed Sydney Harbour Bridge.

However, I think my favourite building would have been The Atlantic Restaurant. Taking tea there must have been a wonderful experience, especially when you consider that most of the visitors would have been living in cramped tenements with outside toilets and gas-lights. It must have seemed like a glimpse of heaven to them.

There are fantastic colour pictures on flickr.

There are black and white pictures in this You Tube clip.