Tag: Glasgow
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the closing year
As the first copies of our 10 Years in the Making book arrived in the KDD warehouse yesterday, I thought (not for the first time) about what a very weird year it has been. We published four brand new titles . . . . . .and created 23 new patterns – the majority of which…
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my McRostie forever bag
Today we released the Evendoon Cardigan – the third pattern in our 10 Years in the Making Club (come and join us for three months of knitting fun!) I really enjoyed styling this cardigan with my beautiful Mull Bag, which was made for me a wee while ago by Colin Campbell of McRostie: one of…
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Glasgow’s atelier economy: then and now
Today I thought I’d share with you the introductory words I wrote for People MAKE Glasgow . For me – a former eighteenth-century specialist – the connections between Glasgow’s eighteenth-century past and its twenty-first century present have always been apparent, and I really enjoyed having the opportunity to write about those connections here. People MAKE…
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Lunardi in Campsie
The revival of my eighteenth-century balloon-o-mania was inspired after some recent walks around Clachan of Camspie and Milton of Campsie (just north and east of where we live) during which I discovered that that balloonist, Vincent Lunardi, landed in Campsie Glen at the conclusion of his second flight from Glasgow in November 1785. After wowing…
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the pillar craig
I’ve been reading a lot of books while researching People Make Glasgow, and one of my favourite recent reads is Ian R Mitchell’s This City Now (reissued as Walking through Glasgow’s Industrial Past in 2015) which offers a brilliant walker’s guide to the city’s industrial history. The book mentions one of Mitchell’s peripatetic-literary Glasgow forbears…
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keeping shop
As part of my research for the introduction to our People Make Glasgow book, I’ve been doing some highly enjoyable work poking about the city’s eighteenth and nineteenth-century post office directories, which provide intriguing lists of Glasgow’s merchants, manufacturing and retail businesses (much like the yellow pages). Looking at these directories across a century or…
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ReJean Denim
One of the things I’ve been really struck by, as I reach the end of the process of writing our People Make Glasgow book, is just how many thriving enterprises in this city are led by brilliant young women. I’ve found learning more about the innovative work of makers, artist and designers like Rachel E…
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An ideal shopping list
I’m currently working hard on our People Make Glasgow book, which approaches its final stages (exciting!) and am finding the different stories the book covers about the city’s making and producing communities really inspiring, thought provoking, and often moving. As well as creative enterprises of all sizes, in fields from woodworking to whisky, the book…
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Carbeth: slavery in the landscape
Here, at Carbeth, we live in a landscape underwritten by many rich and complex human stories. Neolithic people lived and travelled through Carbeth many thousand of years ago and, since these early settlers, this landscape has many stories of passage to tell, from seventeenth-century cattle drovers, to nineteenth-century railway navvies, to the walkers on today’s…
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Repair Café Glasgow
Though we’ve not seen one another in person for more than 6 weeks, the KDD team are in touch every day, and, at the moment, one of the things we are working on from our separate locations is our People MAKE Glasgow book. Over the past year, we’ve conducted a series of interviews and photoshoots…
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Omnia Feminae Aequissimae
You may remember that last year at KDD, we celebrated International Women’s Day by designing and knitting a commemorative blanket together with our good friend, Felicity Ford. Celebrating 30 diverse creative women, our blanket was created with the central aim of using our crafty skills to educate each other about the many different ways in…
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The McCune Smith cafe
Hello, it’s Tom here. In today’s People Make Glasgow post I’d like to introduce the McCune Smith Cafe and Dr. James McCune Smith, the important 19th Century African-American abolitionist, physician, educator and intellectual, after whom the cafe is named. Glasgow’s remarkable nineteenth-century growth was due to imperial trade. That Glasgow was built on tobacco and…
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Introducing People MAKE Glasgow
Hello, it’s Tom here. As those of you who follow the KDD blog will be aware, I’m interested in many kinds of photography. As well as my knitwear and landscape images, I also work on larger photo-documentary projects. The subject I most often return to in my documentary photography is work. I’m especially interested in…
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The work of water
This week’s West Highland Way club design is Stronachlachar – a loose-fitting tee, with, sinuous twisted stitches. The simple cables which twist over the surface of this design have a very direct inspiration in my local built environment, specifically the pipelines and waterworks of the Loch Katrine scheme, which runs from Stronachlachar all the way…
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sprint finish
It has been something of a hectic week here. Tom and I have had our heads down completing our new book, which, all being well, will go to the printers next week. The title we’ve settled on is Shetland Oo: Wool, Textiles Work, and those of you who were keen on the idea of a…