Because of a new scarf idea, I’ve been scouring the internet and what books I have for old lace patterns. I should be more specific and say that I’ve been searching for garter stitch lace edging stitch patterns. During my search I’ve realized that I don’t have nearly enough old publications about knitting. The little taste I got from the library book sale isn’t enough, and some of the internet sources I’ve found have really inspired me. Some were new to me, and others I’ve gone back to many times before.

I’ve looked through old knitting patterns, and pictures of “vintage” style patterns but the vast majority of them really don’t excite me. Anything post-1930s is just too recent, and the styles of the clothing really don’t suit me. Who am I kidding, the style of any non-contemporary knitwear generally doesn’t appeal to me. What really gets me interested are the stitch patterns, knitted household items, clothing accessories, and the very way in which they write the patterns to begin with. If you browse through some old knitting publications you’ll see how far we’ve come in standardizing how we describe these stitches we work. Even today there’s a small learning curve (although sometimes not so small!) to reading a pattern. Imagine the learning curve in days past! Old patterns have no gauge and sometimes have a yarn specification such as “Berlin, or any other soft wool”, refer to “make one” which can sometimes be a yarn over and sometimes a closed increase and the pattern will not explain which it is. Fortunately some people have helped interpreting some of these old patterns and put them online.

• Knitting-and.com’s Free Patterns

• Antique Pattern Library - Scanned public domain full publications!

• The KnitWiki

• The Art of Knitting 1897 - Rewritten and swatched by Cindy

• And a bunch more

I’m not going to go into too many details about this project I’m working on, because I kind of want it to be a surprise. I’m going to make a couple of different versions. The first version I’ve already started knitting away, but I still need to figure out what lace edging I want to use for the second. When I’m done I’ll write up a little pattern for them and post lots of nice pictures. It’s funny because this pattern idea really goes back to something I tend to do time and time again: stuff that you can do with any yarn, and any sized needles.

The more I knit on this scarf and the more I look at it, the more I just love the textured simplicity.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 12:13 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.