My
blog about Auntie Larcombe produced this comment from Cousin Daisy.
“Love this. You have also
inherited her skills with the sewing and knitting.
Socks on 4 needles I remember. We used to sit beside a roaring coal fire with
the light off to “save the leccy”. Happy
days. Not a worry in the world. “
Mum inherited Auntie’s knitting needle bag and needles, including double pointed ones. There were sets of size 11, 12, 13 and 14 needles (3mm, 2.75mm, 2.25mm and 2mm in metric). If she was knitting socks by firelight no wonder she lost her eyesight!
The one thing I always knew about Auntie was that in her later years she
was nearly blind. This was because one summer, when I was about three, Auntie Ed brought
her down to Wales on holiday.
We lived in a bungalow. There were my grandparents, in what would now be called a granny flat,
parents, three older siblings and me. Because of the eccentric design of the house the toilet door was a long way from the pedastle so, for privacy's sake, there was a bolt. The adults were worried I might lock myself in the lavatory so the bolt
was at adult shoulder height, but very small and the same colour as the door.
Auntie managed to find the bolt when she went into the lavatory, but
couldn’t manage to see or feel it to find her way out again, and began to
panic.
Fortunately the toilet had a casement window which opened outwards.
It was large enough and I was small enough to be passed through to guide
her hand to the bolt.
The bag and it's contents were
passed down to me and I actually used some of the needles last year knitting my greatniece’s
Christmas gifts. She loves Frozen.
I’d found a naked Elsa
and Anna in a local charity shop, realised they were much the same dimensions
as Barbie dolls and adapted some patterns I had accordingly.
To save sewing up fiddly tiny seams I did the
bodices in one piece: double ended
needles meant I could differentiate between the front and left and right backs
when increasing or decreasing for the ‘bust’.
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