Here are some out-of-copyright materials I’ve found in my travels. I’ve decided to photograph them and share them here for folks that might be interested!
The Scottish Knit Book – No.1
This was a supplement that came with The People’s Friend, a women’s magazine published out of Dundee.
Here is a pattern for the Sanquhar Set, both gloves and scarf. Sanquhar is a town wedged between two mountain ranges in Dumfries & Galloway and has the oldest working post office on Britain.
The scarf is knit in the round, in the ‘Rose’ pattern. Sanquhar patterns are usually 11×11 pattern repeats called things like ‘The Duke’ or ‘The Trellis’.
Lace shawls from the remote Shetland Islands are both staggering manifestations of skill and shrewd business; on islands with few resources, Shetlanders spun the neck hair of their primative sheep into fine yarn and knit shawls worth more than their weight in gold.
I have modified the above pattern as it the Paton wool company used a slur as an adjective for their brown wool. Disgraceful, but it shouldn’t be entirely surprising.
Scotland was complicit in the Atlantic slave trade, the cotton spun and woven in Scottish mills was often grown by slaves, and modern Glasgow was largely built off the import and sale of slave grown tobacco.
