This will all make sense soon.
Wait, no it won’t.
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Tags: spy gear, vintage, wishful thinking
I began Free Pattern Friday as a way to share all the vintage patterns I love with everyone else who might not have access to them. Quite often originals can be hard to find, especially pre-1940s (with some exceptions, including Iva Rose Reproductions). I also believe strongly that sharing information and getting others interested in it is what keeps it alive. Without a person actively digging into a subject deeply with glee, many facts, skills, arts, and works are lost to time. So imagine my joy at finding the National Library of Australia had scanned numerous newspapers and periodicals from the 1800s-1940s, and even greater joy at realizing their interface allowed for easy searching, public tagging, and public text correction.
A number of these publications contained ‘Women’s Supplements’, separate sections of the paper filled with all sorts of patterns and gossip on the latest stars and scandals, presumably because looking at national news might hurt womens’ heads. Still, there is a treasure to be dug out of these pages! Ravelry person shabbyknits found these beauties:
Knitted in Eyelet Fashion
New Pouched Jumper
…and I only searched ‘knitting’ and came up with these wonderful patterns amongst many, many others (click for the pattern):
Knit This In One Piece
For Your Holidays
Ski-ing Days: Where Hearts Are Trump
Ideal For The Summer Cruise
They’re out there! I didn’t even look for crocheted stuff! Oh, did I mention they have a one-click option to save as a PDF or image file? Your choice, at whatever zoom level you want (admittedly it gets a bit fiddly, breaking up into strange pieces sometimes, but thems the breaks). I ask that anyone reading this who has an interest in vintage patterns hops over there ASAP and starts searching, tagging, and correcting where possible, and if you’re on Ravelry, add them to the database! Even if you just add a link and the title, one of the obsessives (such as myself) will come along and add the rest of the information, and so another pattern will be shared with the world.
Tags: 1930, 1940, 30s, 40s, cardigan, flower, forties, fringe, hearts, intarsia, jumper, Knitting, lace, patterns, sweater, Thirties, vintage
Aw, nuts. I was going to do a salute to the Men of Knitting, but didn’t have time to dig through my archives. Instead, I briefly proffer this snappy cardigan (the fellow on the left) for those who like their retro a tad more on the camp side. It’s less ‘sitting by the fire smoking a pipe’ and more ‘preparing to look cool in my glass boomerang-shaped house on the moon’.
True, it’s a little late to start knitting it up for this Sunday, but you can always surprise Dad in time Christmas!
‘Gee, that sounds swell!’
On a completely random note, here’s a group of people who dressed up like Ned Flanders, certainly a man who knows how to sport some knitwear:
Tags: 50s, cardigan, fifties, man, men, retro, striped, sweater, vintage
Here’s a trim, vaguely military number ready for warm weather. The chevron collar tabs are what sold me on this pattern from Sunglo no. 68, with the wee chevron pocket sealing the deal. What could you possibly fit in there? A pack of Listermints? Three cents? Ah, the frivolty and excess of fashion! Even the sleeves are a tad longer than truly necessary, and could be shortened without sacrificing the vintage look.
I recently watched a documentary on the Shakers, a religious group who believed amongst other things that work was a form of worship, and should be done simply and perfectly as God was in the details.
This didn’t mean work had to be hard; far from it, the Shakers invented numerous labor-saving devices to achieve a greater amount in less time, including the circular saw, round barns with ground-level hay loading, and the clothespin. In keeping with this belief, buildings, objects and clothes had no unnecessary ornamentation, but were absolutely practical and beautiful in their usefulness.
The Met has a Shaker room on display in its American wing- to look at it after rooms full of gaudy prints, rococo and baroque carved tables and chairs and yards of swag and drapery, is to see zen calm and peace radiating from smooth wood. It’s very austere, almost to the point of severity, but the care with which everything was put together shines warmly through.
A friend of mine is constantly on the lookout for the most basic of striped t-shirts: regular crew neck, stripes between 1/2-1 1/2 inches, preferably in non-neon colors. Somehow, they’re impossible to find. Either they have a v-neck, some weird patch sewn on, paint splatters with skulls and swirls screened over, the stripes have some fake distressed look, something. Every designer feels the need to add their little bit of flair to what is already a perfect design, ruining it from simple perfection. So it is with much of fashion, taking something that is clean and austere and slapping on a frill or tuck.
At the same time, those tiny details can occasionally enhance a basic outline, bringing out its shape more clearly, drawing attention to neat construction. So I hope it is with this pattern, that despite the inherent silliness of a useless pocket, overall the shirt is simple, yet pleasing.
Tags: 1940s, 40s, blouse, chevron, collar, forties, sweater, tee, vintage
Today’s free pattern is again courtesy of the Australian Home Journal. It bills itself as ‘a most attractive design for the larger figure and suitable for a Mother’s Day gift’, because we all know behind every ‘yo momma’s so fat’ joke lies a grain of truth. Personally I’d like to see the swallow spaced out further on the top and closer underneath, to form a neat triangle design, but perhaps the original designers tried that and found bird boobs weren’t a good look for matrons.
