Time to start

I have this astonishing collection of knitting patterns that show that we can be glamorous and stylish and fabulous and unique.

I started collecting them when I wasn't knitting and thought how cool they were but now I realise they tell another story too, not just of the fashion of the ages but the social history too. They tell of technological developments in textiles and knitting wool. They tell of the way that we have become larger in the past 70 years. They tell of how and what a woman was expected to be but also how we consider that today. They show that some things truly never go out of fashion.

It is an amazing collection but I am a bad curator. I just let it sit unexplored in boxes occasionally I'll dip into them and have a look through but the actual amount of knitting that I have done with them is practically zero.

Because of this I have decided that opening an Etsy shop would be a great way to share them among other collectors and knitting aficionados.

This is my first box (there’s over 250 patterns there) either Patons or Bestway and under my bed is another 7 boxes of similar size and boxes of 1950s and 1960s Pins and Needles magazines, and a couple of decades of Stitchcrafts from the 1940s to the late 1960s. So it’s a work in progress and it might take me some time to get through them all.