Journal

Knitting from a 1944 Vogue Pattern: What I’m Making Next for My Maker’s Wardrobe

I’m on the sleeves of the current cardigan. Which means, predictably, my brain has completely moved on.

This is a pattern I recognise in myself. The nearer I get to finishing something, the louder the call of the next thing. The risk is always the same: abandon the current project, start something new, find the abandoned one five years later at the bottom of a bag. So this year, with the Maker’s Wardrobe project, I’m trying something different. I’m letting myself plan (swatches, yarn choices, thinking through the problems) but nothing gets cast on until the current cardigan is done.

In this week’s film I take you through the book I’m working from and the pattern I’ve chosen.

Vogue’s 25th Knitting Book, 1944

I collect vintage Vogue Knitting Books. Most of them (the 1950s and 60s issues) can be found for around £7. But the wartime books are a different matter. Fewer were printed. They were passed hand to hand, worn out, lost. Finding a genuine mid-1940s copy takes patience.

I spent some birthday money on this one. Twenty-three pounds for a single magazine, which felt extravagant until I opened it.

The book is edited under the direction of Audrey Withers, who ran British Vogue throughout the Second World War. Her stated purpose was to keep up the spirit and glamour of British women, to maintain the sense that beauty and fashion were worth protecting even in the middle of everything. The paper was rationed. Many of the photoshoots were taken on bomb sites. By 1944, wool was on coupon (with some exceptions for baby wool and yarn destined for the armed forces), and the knitting magazine reflects this at every turn.

What you get is not just patterns. You get instructions for unravelling old jumpers to reknit the wool. You get designs for knitted fronts (“dickies”) that could be worn under a jacket to give the impression of a new blouse without requiring the coupons for one. You get colour-blocked designs that make a virtue of having two different partial balls of wool rather than enough of one. The whole thing is a lesson in making beauty within constraint.

The photographs are by Lee Miller, likely some of the last fashion photographs she took before she left for the front as a war correspondent. If you want to understand the world these patterns were made in, the film Lee (2023) is a good place to start. There’s also Dressed for War by Julie Summers, a biography of Audrey Withers, which is excellent.

A digitised copy of the book is held by the Glasgow Women’s Library: Glasgow Women’s Library

The Pattern I’ve Chosen

I’m making the wheat ear rib cardigan. It’s longer than the short cardigans I’ve been knitting. It sits below the waist and the rib stitch stands up in high relief. The neckline buttons high or opens out. There are pockets with a wheat ear edging.

The photograph is by Lee Miller. The model has red nails, a statement bracelet, and a jazzy scarf. It does not look frumpy. That matters, because I have had long cardigans before and something goes wrong and suddenly I am wearing a dressing gown and feeling blue.

I’m cautiously optimistic.

The practical challenges before I cast on are real. The pattern is written for a 34-inch bust, one size only, in a three-ply wool on size nine needles. I’m going to need to regrade it entirely, which means working out the maths from swatches before I start. In the film I talk through how I’m approaching this.

The Yarns

I’m choosing from three wools in my stash, all in autumn colours. The dresses this cardigan needs to go with are greens, bronzes, and dark burgundies. There’s a lambswool with a slight mottled quality, a lambswool-alpaca mix from John Arbon, and a cashmere. I’ll be swatching all three at different needle sizes, looking for the right drape rather than trying to hit the exact tension (since I’m regrading anyway).

Why This Project Matters

There’s something I keep coming back to with this book. These patterns were created under genuine hardship: paper shortages, rationing, bombing. The women making them, the women photographing them, the women knitting from them were living through something difficult. And the response was not to stop caring about beauty or craft. It was to find ways to keep doing it anyway.

I find that worth paying attention to.

The Maker’s Wardrobe project is about building a wardrobe of things I love and will actually wear, slowly, with attention, one considered piece at a time. Knitting from a 1944 pattern feels like the right extension of that.

Why Victorian Needlepoint self destructs

I bought this needlepoint on Vinted for £8. It arrived as a cushion, stabilised on the back with iron-on vilene, which should have been a clue. Underneath, the black background was falling apart. Not fading, not worn. Actively crumbling, the wool fibres breaking down into something that looks more like ash than yarn.

The cause is the dye. To achieve that deep Victorian black, dyers used heavy tannin and iron, often without sufficient rinsing. Over 150 years, the acid produced by that combination has destroyed the wool and started eating through the canvas beneath it. In the film below I look at what happened, what it tells us about using iron in our own natural dyeing practice, and what on earth you do with a piece like this once you understand what’s going on.

Elsa Schiaparelli’s knitwear and the women who made it possible

I went to the Schiaparelli retrospective at the V&A last weekend and came home thinking not about the couture, but about the 1920s knitwear at the beginning of the show, and about how businesses actually start.

The official origin story, as with most origin stories, turns out to be simpler than the truth. When I started following the trail of who was actually involved in getting Schiaparelli’s business off the ground, I kept finding women who’d been described in a single word. Socialite. Buyer. Friend. Women who, when you look properly, turn out to have been doing something quite specific and quite important.

The biographer Anna Funder writes that whenever she comes across someone described that flatly in a historical source, she follows it, because nine times out of ten it leads to a woman who made something happen but didn’t get the credit for it. That’s exactly what I found here.

In this film I look at the years 1920 to 1929, the knitwear that launched the business, the Armenian refugee whose technique made the bow jumper possible, and the women around Schiaparelli who provided money, contacts, shelter and opportunity at the moments when she needed them most.

Natural Dyeing with Hawthorn: Four Colours from One Tree

Hawthorn has been part of British life for at least 6,000 years. The pollen shows up in the record from that far back. It’s in the folk medicine, the May Day celebrations, the hedgerows, the fairy tales. One of those plants that human beings have simply always been alongside.

It’s also one of the best dye plants you’re likely to find in your garden or local hedgerow, and it gives you more than you might expect from a single shrub.

In this video I’m working with hawthorn I’ve cut from a self-seeded shrub in my own garden. By keeping the leaves and the bark from the twigs separate, and then modifying one skin from each bath with iron, I end up with four quite different colours.

Why Hawthorn Works as a Dye Plant

The leaves and the inner bark give very different results. The leaves produce yellows — a soft, mid golden yellow. The inner bark (the layer between the outer bark and the white interior wood) gives a warmer, more orange-caramel tone.

If you’re gathering from a hedge or tree rather than a garden shrub, you’d ideally strip just the inner bark from larger branches. On small thorny twigs it’s more practical to chop the twigs into pieces and work with what you can.

A word about the thorns: the leaf-bearing branches tend to sit around the spines rather than between them. You can strip leaves off by holding the main stem and drawing your hand along it. It works well and saves a lot of fiddling.

What You’ll Need

• Hawthorn leaves (fresh, not tough old ones; end-of-spring leaves work fine)
• Hawthorn twigs with inner bark (small twigs chopped, larger ones stripped)
• Pre-mordanted wool (I’m using alum-mordanted sock wool)
• Washing soda (sodium carbonate), about half a teaspoon per pan
• Ferrous sulphate, about half a teaspoon for the iron modifier bath
• pH strips
• White vinegar
• Two dye pans, one modifier bowl

Step 1: Prepare the Leaves

Strip the leaves from their stems and put them straight into your pan. Cover with just-boiled water, add a small amount of washing soda (roughly half a teaspoon), and bring to a simmer.

The washing soda makes the bath alkaline. This matters because simmering plant matter naturally acidifies the water, so you’re just counteracting that a little. It also seems to help bring out yellow tones.

Simmer for around 20 minutes, then let it cool. Reheat, cool again, and if you can leave it to steep overnight you’ll get a richer colour.

Step 2: Prepare the Bark

Separate your twigs from any leaves, leaves going into the leaf pan, twigs into their own pile. On larger pieces, try to scrape off the outer bark so you’re left with just the inner layer. On smaller twigs, chop them into pieces; there’s no need to be precise.

Add washing soda (a full teaspoon this time, as the cell structure of bark needs more help), cover with boiling water, and you’ll likely see colour coming out almost immediately.

Leave this one for at least 24 hours before straining.

Step 3: Strain and Check pH

Strain both baths and discard the plant material. The leaf bath will be a warm golden colour. The bark bath should be a rich orange-brown.

Check the pH of both. After steeping, the bark bath in particular is likely to be quite alkaline, around 10. Add white vinegar, a little at a time, until it comes back to neutral or just slightly acidic. Don’t do this while the liquid is hot.

Step 4: Dye the Wool

I’m using pre-mordanted sock wool, two skeins per bath.

For the leaf bath: soak your wool, squeeze it out well, and lower it into the warm dye bath. Bring the temperature up to a comfortable hand-hot (not simmering, definitely not boiling) and hold it there for about half an hour. The colour should transfer well at this temperature without risking felting or damage to the fibre.

For the bark bath: the same process. The colour tends to be more concentrated, so you may see a bigger change in the dye bath as the wool takes it up.

Leave one skein from each bath undipped in iron. These are your base colours.

Step 5: Modify with Iron (Saddening)

The process of using iron to shift a colour is called saddening. It darkens and dulls the original colour, which sounds less appealing than it is. The results are often the most interesting of the four.

Dissolve about half a teaspoon of ferrous sulphate in a bowl of water. The granules are mint green and dissolve quickly.

Take one skein from the leaf bath, squeeze it well, and lower it into the iron bath. The colour shifts almost immediately toward green-grey. Keep an eye on it; it doesn’t take long. Once you’re happy with the colour, move it to a rinse bowl.

Do the same with the skein from the bark bath. This one moves toward a warmer, darker brown.

One note: keep your iron solution well away from your undipped skeins. Iron spots are very hard to remove, and a splash can leave permanent marks. Use a separate stirring stick for the iron bath.

The Four Colours

From this one plant:

• Leaf, no modifier: soft golden yellow
• Leaf, iron modifier: green-grey
• Bark, no modifier: caramel orange-brown
• Bark, iron modifier: warm mid-brown

Plant dyes are always subtle. You can push the iron further and get darker results, but the more iron you use, the more you risk degrading the fibre over time. A little goes a long way.

A Note on Hawthorn

I dye with native plants whenever I can, but hawthorn is one I particularly like working with. Something about the depth of its relationship with people here, 6,000 years of entangled life, medicine, superstition, celebration, means that wearing something dyed with it feels like wearing something of this place.

The skeins I’ve dyed here are going into a pair of striped socks, alongside nettle-dyed wool from an earlier session. I’ll show you those when they’re finished.

Here is a download with all the instructions