Knitting is a lot like cooking. When I’ve been in the kitchen all day the last thing I want to do is eat what I’ve made. Sometimes I can barely taste it anymore after all that sampling and, yes  okay, licking out the bowl too. Similarly, after a long time working on a piece of knitting the last thing I want to do is wear the thing. It’s always the wrong shape, the wrong colour or just the wrong me.

This means that my nearest and dearest have been the happy recipients of my labours over the years. My sister Jane was the one who grimaced least, so ended up with most of the jumpers. When she moved continents recently I salvaged whole piles of hand-knits in need of some TLC.

This Patricia Roberts vase of flowers was actually knitted by my Mum. It was called April Showers, though you wouldn’t know it. Being a busy woman, she didn’t have any truck with silly things like rain drops and so missed these out of the finished thing.

What’s fun is trying to match the sweaters with the original patterns. I’m sure some of them have gone the way of small things, but I seem to have stashed away quite a few, and now I’m moving into my own studio (did I mention that a few times already) I have the space to sort them out.

Looking through the old patterns, some of which I inherited from my Mum and Grand-mum, I was astonished to see ones that were from mainstream publications that would steer clear of ‘that sort of thing’ these days. I have a pile that come from the Guardian newspaper. Every week you could write off and they would send you a pattern, these ones are all from Jaeger. One of Jaeger’s brochures announced ‘Life Is Full of Surprises, Why Isn’t Your Wardrobe‘. I’m not sure I want that many surprises…

This Wheatsheaf Aran pattern was by Wendy yarns and given away with The Sunday Times colour supplement in 1984. (When did they stop being ‘colour supplements’ and start being magazines?) I think my sister sent off for the whole kit. It’s astonishing that it has survived,   although it’s looking a bit peaky now, thirty years later. Perhaps newspapers will again wake up to the fact that some of their readers are knitters and start doing this again? We could knit a petition.