Craft Magazines a Plenty

At last the sun has come out and the barn is beginning to warm up a bit so I decided to try to organise my collection of craft and sewing magazines - some date from the 1950’s on. Many of them still have the original embroidery transfers within - most look as though they have never been opened. The one that interested me was a sewing magazine with an embroidery transfer plus embroidered pictures of Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation - co-incidentally King Charles Coronation happens on this Saturday (6th May 2023). How did I land up with these - well my sisters and I were at a jumble sale and my sister bought a huge box of them for me.

Try as I might though, there are hardly any adverts for knitting machines in either the knitting machine orientated magazines or in the sewing magazines, so strange. I did however come across an interesting piece describing sewing machines of the day and part 2 of the feature even included the models and prices.

With these books finally in order, I then carried on the task by sorting into date order my knitting machine magazines, which include a good few titles. What a choice we had then, its a pity they most stopped publishing, however near the end some designers were fixated on electronic knitting machines and the patterns that could be achieved on the dreadful drop shoulder designs. Big mistake in my opinion and this was one of the factors that brought about the sad decline in interest in machine knitting. Looking through the magazines, particulary from machine knitting’s heyday, there were some wonderful designs, wearable collections and so many yarn manufacturers out there looking for business. The one thing that amazes me is that some of the collections were knittted on the most basic of machines - I look at my magazines from the 50’s and 60’s and 70’s - and what a choice - so many patterns, the machines then were punchcards or simple maroon knitmasters. Just for a little while, before publishing ceased, magazines like Machine Knitting News began to offer wonderful glossy pages of far superior designs which would persuade any machine knitter to knit, however, whatever happened in those final years this particular favourite of mine suddernly stopped publishing and then decided to concentrate on hand knitting - such a shame but I suppose like all businesses they had to bow to demand. Their other competitor, Machine Knitting Monthy survived but then even it concentrated on hand knitting designs adapted for machine knitting - absoutely amazing, really when you consider what knitting machines can do nowadays in the right hands. I am so glad I joined Facebook as the machine knitting forums offer so much talent and innovation - makes you want to take out that knitting machine and simply knit.