Tag: Newhaven
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pockets
I have been knitting pockets. I am designing something which requires a pocket of a certain kind and I spent most of yesterday testing out several. By mid-afternoon, after creating a curious sampler composed of several different kinds of mini-pocket, I had a mild eureka moment, and devised what I reckon is the the perfect…
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Christie Johnstone
This sweater is all about colour and pattern. I have already mentioned the unconscious influence of a blanket, but, in a conscious way at least, what I was inspired by were the shor’ goons (short gowns / blouses) that were worn by Newhaven fishwives. I’ve seen a couple of surviving late nineteenth-century examples, which are…
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Caller Herrin’
When I began thinking about this design, I was reading about the intertwined histories of fishing and knitting, and Tom and I were coincidentally (and very happily) going through a kipper-eating phase (Fortune’s are my favourite). I wanted to make a hat that was an homage to the herring – the humble-yet-once-highly-lucrative fish whose annual…
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acquisitive
To my mind, historians have to be acquisitive – history is basically curiosity – a getting-hold-of the answers to the questions one has about the past. In my case, these acquisitive tendencies can take a very literal form — I get my teeth into an idea, and if that idea can be relatively cheaply fleshed…
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scuppered
Unfortunately, any plans I might have had for the weekend have been scuppered by fatigue. Yesterday was so bad that I couldn’t get up from the sofa, was approaching the incoherent mumbling stage, and had vertigo and nausea to add to the mix. Nice. Today seems a little better – at least my brain is…
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do you admire this costume?
I am becoming obsessed with the elaborately starched and stripey ‘costume’ of the Newhaven fishwives – and what it says about the ways in which the hard lives of working women might be reinvented as romance. These mass-produced ornaments were extremely popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They come in several varieties, and…
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fishy
Not a bad week, all in all. I lost part of Thursday and all day Friday to the dreaded fatigue, but apart from that I feel as if I am finally starting to do things which almost amount to a form of productive labour. This is important. I’ve been working on my patterns, walking around…