The ministry of war feared that knitting patterns could be used to send encrypted messages so it became illegal to send knitting patterns by international mail.
So knitters were stuck with whatever patterns they already owned or had to make up their own patterns. To compensate for this inconvenience, the war office got busy making up knitting patterns and encouraging people to knit for the services. Earlier in the year I spent a happy morning looking through three archive boxes full of them. There are more boxes but not everything is accessible at the moment because of the refurbishments.
Imperial War Museum Archives Eph. This is the image of the Land Girl we are all familiar with. Look at her. She rides on the back of a hay-rick. She waves coyly at American G. Is and throws her head back when she laughs. Sometimes she might lead a horse around a field — a nice horse, with ribbons in its mane, and a name like Clumper or Queenie or something. And she is lovely. The photograph records in the IWM archive show an awful lot of rat-catching.
There are some wonderful photographs too. The archive can be found at bbc. These scans are taken from a copy I bought online — sorry about any shaky words! Khaki green is not my style so I decided to make this up in brown wool Holst Garn supersoft — colourway: Conker.
The yarn is unwashed so it still has a whiff of sheep about it for that authentic Land Girl perfume. Thankfully, the sheepishness soon washes out. The grease helps stop the yarn splitting on the needle and has the added bonus of keeping your fingers nice and soft. The first thing that strikes me about this pattern is how simple it appears to be.
