Excerpt from term paper:

For the knit cardigan, I started with a photo of a make-do-and-mend booklet I found online. In the booklet, they encourage unravelling old knit garments to get yarn in order to make new ones. I chose to follow this method and went on the hunt for a second-hand knit sweater that could be unraveled and reknit following a 1940’s pattern. Most 1940’s knitting patterns call for the use of fingering weight yarn which is fairly thin. In my search for the correct weight of yarn from an old sweater, I found that most sweaters today are primary knit in two weights - thin like thread (too thin for me), or a thicker worsted weight. I was finally able to find one sweater of the correct weight of yarn, however, it was a cotton/acrylic mix which is not ideal for the notoriously cold Bletchley Park. Unfortunately, I did not have the luxury of time with this initial item as I knew it would be a challenge to even finish the knitting in the time I had available. I chose to move forward with what the cotton/acrylic mix I had found.

There are many pattern websites online that have vintage knitting patterns. My challenge was to find one that was from 1941-1945 and British. Many patterns I found were American or Australian. Eventually, I discovered the archive of vintage knitting patterns on the University of Southampton’s digital library. I chose to follow a patten from the yarn company Patons & Baldwins titled, “No 2760 Women’s Service Cardigan.” It is clear it is a wartime pattern not only from the name but from the photograph on the cover of the pattern that shows a woman in the cardigan holding a wartime helmet. This cardigan took approximately two and half months to knit. I had my doubts about the finished piece when I saw the shape of the flat pieces. The increase from the waist section seemed too extreme and not graded enough however when wearing the cardigan, it is smooth on the sides and that increase accommodates for the bust perfectly. A mantra I repeat to myself constantly while knitting is “trust the pattern” and in this case the pattern was correct.

I knit the cardigan on needles handed down to me by my grandmother. She was born in England in 1928 so was a teenager during the war. My mother remembers her telling stories of watching flashes of light from exploding bombs coming into the house underneath the door. My grandmother moved to Canada in the early 1950’s. She was a prolific knitter likely bringing needles with her from the UK which I have since inherited. Most of these needles are labelled with the old UK sizes which the World War II patterns called for. The old UK size was based off the imperial wire gages and likely changed after the UK changed to metric in 1965. I was therefore only able to use the correct needles for the pattern (even though a modern pair would have been the same sizes in millimetres), I was also using needles that were used by her and bent over time by her hands. Knitting needles, both wood and metal, when used by a knitter have a tendency to get a bend in them from how the knitter holds them.

Craft historian Glenn Adamson writes about how memory is infused in craft in a variety of ways. He writes how “Artisans forge objects of memory that allow us to articulate…between the present and the past and therefore between the individual and the collective.” (Adamson, 2013, 210.) For me this cardigan creates a through-line between my grandmother's past and my present, between our individual selves, and together her and I, as a collective of makers who have used these tools.