We talked shop, we talked Bake Off, we set the world of carrot cakes to rights (walnuts or no? Discuss...) until, as it invariably does when one is 'partying hard', the conversation ended up at the topic of French knitting.
It turned out every one of us had spent vast swathes of our youth bent over a wooden doll with a tube through her middle and four pins in her head, tongues firmly between our teeth as we 'knitted' great big worms of wool which protruded from the dolly's nether regions and coiled down to the floor. For what and for why we asked ourselves? What was the purpose of this bizarre pursuit? Who needs boxes of woollen worms and what could anyone ever do with such things?
The Orcadian (as usual) came to the rescue:
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| Taken from a 1926 copy of the Orcadian. Ten years of looking through these things and the casual use of a word like 'cripple' is still really jarring. |
The next week's issue offered readers the opportunity to make a fabric version of a cat who's just remembered that he's not done something really, really important:
