Can you experience nostalgia for a time before you were born?  I love the style of the 1940s – fashion, films, books – everything seemed to have such class, where man-made things were made with wit and charm – think screwball comedies, noir films, Hollywood glamour.  Everyone just seemed like they stood up straighter, and it wasn’t always the homogenic pretty faces that blared at you from every image, like we have now.  Every face seemed to have such character – think Barbara Stanwick, Cary Grant, Betty Davis, Gregory Peck… mmm Gregory Peck… (now there’s someone to distract you from the task at hand!)  OK, I may have my rose-tints on looking back to a time over 60 years ago, but hey, that’s nostalgia, innit?

I have been collecting old knitting patterns since… well a long time, and in picking up anything that fires my imagination from those golden olden days, I have discovered an equal appreciation of the knitting patterns 1930s and the 1950s.  The 30s have such inventive construction techniques, as if the rules weren’t all locked down, and the 50s have such polish, as if all the designs of the previous decades have coalesced into the simple perfect lines of a flattering feminine silhouette.

For me, I think the appeal of old vintage knitting patterns is the appeal of the serious playfulness of early modernity before the ubiquity of the mass produced, the throw away culture that made everything seem loose, lazy and uninteresting.  It seems that so much made before 1960 still had the hand of the artisan visible in it.  Oh, and as a homo sapiens who likes to feed her homo faber, and her homo ludens appetites, I just love anything that gets those faber/ludens juices flowing.

I’m going to use this site’s Knitting Vintage pages to share my love of vintage knits.  There’ll be some patterns for free, some for a small fee, some as published, some tweaked to suit my tastes.  There’ll be tips on interpreting old knitting terms into current ones, suggestions on yarn substitutions, and images of my attempts to master these works from old artisans.

I’m going to try to put something up once a week.  Too ambitious?  Perhaps, but I may as well give it a try.  I find you always learn something new and unexpected when you push yourself.

I hope you, fellow knitter,  find something among these vintage gems that will stoke your creative fires too.

Sophia