The centuries-old craft of knitting has left behind few lasting traces. Knitting was such an everyday occurrence for so many people, people who often left little historical record, that we are left with many unanswered questions about the early days of the craft.
It is no wonder then that The Old Hand-Knitters of the Dales became an instant classic from the time it was first published in 1951. Yorkshire natives Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby interviewed dozens of local knitters, chronicling the skills and habits of a people who continued to produce handknits prodigiously, even as the Industrial Revolution chugged on around them.
Now, more than 60 years later, historian Penelope Lister Hemingway has revived this charming, out-of-print classic with a new foreword and patterns you can make yourself to delve deeper into this knitting history classic text.
Just the Facts
178 pages, including 1 pattern reconstructed from an original Dales glove
ISBN: 978-1-937513-26-9
This book is available in both print and digital format. Please note that the digital format is listed separately. You will receive a PDF download of the book with your print purchase.
Meet the Revised Edition Foreword Author
Penelope Lister Hemingway writes for various genealogy and knitting magazines in the UK and US, and wrote River Ganseys, previously published by Cooperative Press (2014).
She has a degree and PGCE from The University of Birmingham, where she specialized in Old Norse and Old English, as well as eighteenth-century literature and also studied at the University of Northern Colorado. She was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire; and descends from a long line of wool weavers, and pioneers of aniline dyeing, as well as Dales knitters, farmers and inland mariners. She has five sons, and when she is not reverse engineering nineteenth-century knitting, or in an archive researching the history of knitting, can be found spinning and dyeing.