Friday 12 April 2013

Yarn updates thanks to the Glen Waverley Bazaar


 
Finally, I have got around to updating the most popular segment of this blog, the Yarns page. I went to the Glen Waverley vintage bazaar in suburban Melbourne with my daughter today, and amongst other treasures, I bought a pile of old Australian knitting books. Two of these were a kind of book I have never seen before, and believe me, I've seen a LOT of knitting books. (I have at least two thousand.) These books appeared to be an annual catalogue of Patons knitting books and the designs they contain, a boon for a collector like me. Also, one of them contained descriptions of all the wools produced by Patons at that time, which I estimate to be in the early to mid 1950s. I wondered why I had never seen books like this before, and I guess that although there is general knitting information, and a pattern or two, such books were not often kept for long by knitters, and mostly ended up in the rubbish bin.

The other great source for trying to find information about vintage yarns is Trove. Trove is the digitised pictorial collection of the National Library of Australia and several other State Library collections. Most of the information about knitting yarns comes from advertisements from old newspapers, such as the following:
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/58969601

I have just discovered that all the patterns published in the newspapers are also indexed, so there's a another few hundred hours of my life gone.

So I will continue to update the Australian yarns as I find the information and the time, but I rely on overseas readers to share their knowledge of what current yarns could do as equivalents to vintage yarns. Let's hear from readers in the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, and the rest of the world too, please.

2 comments:

  1. just found your blog, I am a lover of old knitting / crochet patterns too, look forward to reading more of your blog during the next week or so, (need more time)..
    I have had a few of those Patons overview booklets, I'll check my file box to see if I still have them. (I do sell a lot on ebay)

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  2. Thanks Lyndel, I am probably one of your eBay customers!

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