My knitting of late seems to have had a bit of a nostalgic theme. Several projects that have been inspired by times past. I’ve been restoring old things and reconstructing old things from old patterns!

The first is a bag. I found a collection of vintage patterns from the 1940’s for bag designs and really fell in love with them, I decided to start with this one. The pattern is not so romantically titled “Purse #2725” from The Spool Cotton Company and is available online here at freevintageknitting.com

Here is my version, it is knit in DK rather than worsted so it comes up slightly smaller than the original. It is simple to knit the body, most of the work is in the reinforcing and lining and in the buckles and handle (which really really seems to take forever to knit!).

I’m making 3 more in bright colours, blue, green and yellow for the shop. This is an out of copyright pattern from 1945. It’s amazing how little yarn it actually takes but if you think about the period those had to be thrifty times I suppose. The bags will be priced at £45 each. Everything is hand-knitted and hand-sewn like all my items.

My next project was working on a little heirloom which is a dolly my grandmother made for my daughter, which over the years has taken a battering and is now not considered so cool by my teenager! But I wanted to bring her back to her former glory.

The pattern is “Morag MacScarecrow” by Jean Greenhowe. Our Morag had quite a lot of loose stitching and had also lost her knitting and needles from her bag and needed a good old wash! Here is a picture of Morag before restoration (but after washing!)

and after

I remade her knitting and needles, which had been played with and lost - they were so cute to make, I really enjoyed it. Here's a close up, there's a little ball of yarn tucked into the bag too.

And because of working on Morag I remembered that we used to have another Jean Greenhowe dolly made by my grandmother but which got lost in a house move, “Emily”, a Victorian style doll. I managed to get the pattern booklet, here’s a photo of the cover.

So Emily will be remade, maybe not quite as skillfully as I don’t have the 50 years of knitting experience that my grandmother had when she made this, but I’m looking forward to getting her back!

Also you may remember in my post a while back about vintage knitting patterns I had picked up and one was from the 60’s for a “Mersey Mascot” a kind of Beatle type dolly with winklepicker feet, Mod suit and guitar! This was a little challenging as the pattern was incomplete, there were no directions at all for the jacket so I had to figure one out from the photo, but I managed to work something out.

In the pattern it instructed to make him a guitar out of cardboard with chalked on details but I wanted to make him a knitted guitar instead so I invented him one. I like how he turned out! His face is funny because I’m not great at human-like eyes but I do love him!

And finally I popped into one of my local charity shops this week and amazingly they must have been reading my mind, for one they actually had a box of patterns so I rifled through it to see if there was anything interesting and found this one, from 1970 for a sweater and knickerbockers!

I just loved the picture on the front with the dog and the whole look of it with the floppy hat. I really don’t know if I’ll ever make the knickerbockers, don’t think I could quite pull them off! But maybe for fun one day…