Call me Miss Marple! Over the last few weeks I have succeeded in yet another detective hunt. This time I was hunting for some antique patterns by Miss Henrietta Ryder, one of the Victorian knitting authors I have written about on other occasions. I was doing this to help my dear twin-sister, who was preparing a talk about the Ryder sisters for our Huddersfield KCG branch meeting. We knew the Ryder sisters had published more patterns than just the one book and the five sets of pattern cards we had collected, and Marie wanted to present more comprehensive information than we had gleaned thus far.
For our growing collection of antique knitting artefacts and publications with special Yorkshire interest, we recently acquired some antique supplements from ‘The Queen, the Lady’s Newspaper and Court Circular’. The Queen was a weekly publication dating back to early Victorian times. The supplements in question were illustrated patterns by Miss Henrietta Ryder, so my sister wondered if there were more supplements than the two we had acquired and the one I nearly acquired (a pattern for a ‘cricket jumper’ that was just too costly for me). I have access to Victorian newspaper archives, so I searched these for more Ryder patterns. I did find some, though not many. I was most intrigued however by the following advert, which appeared an August 1989 edition of The Queen:
Regular readers will know I already have a book of stocking patterns by Henrietta. I was intrigued to find evidence that she had written other stocking top patterns, and following this new detective trail I managed to find some in ‘The Work-table’ section of ‘The Queen’. However, my extensive internet searches found no reference to ‘The Culloden Series’, or the named patterns from that series after Victorian times. Like The Richmond Glove (a pattern of which I now have an original copy!) it seemed for a while that The Culloden Series was lost to history. Oh, what I would give to get my hands on that particular set of pattern cards!
I am not however prone to quitting once I have the bit between my teeth, so I continued searching Victorian newspaper archives for mention of The Culloden Series, and my efforts eventually paid off. In September 1900 The Work-table section of the Queen included a particularly juicy reference to The Culloden Series:
Joy of joys, the patterns that followed were accompanied by photographs of the jerseys! I excitedly opened my charting app, and carefully transposed the image to produce a chart of the ‘Clover Leaf’ pattern, which was presented in a colourwork band on the first jersey. I then used this pattern to form a colourwork band below the cuff of a sock. Adding cables and a related pattern before the toe, I produced a sock which immediately became my personal favourite sock design of the many I have thus far created. Yes, I will publish this pattern!
