Clearing out the loft on Saturday we came across a whole bunch of knitting stuff. Needles, wool, stitch counters. We even found a half-made jumper, still on the needles that will never be finished now.

Most interesting, though, was a whole folder full of old patterns, carefully annotated over the years. Growing up, almost all of our clothes were home made for a good long time, and I have no doubt that some of the kids’ patterns in that folder were to be found in my and my sister’s wardrobes in the mid- to late-70s and early 80s.

Some were truly tasteless, clearly, and not the kind of things you’d get away in modern-day hoodie society. Some others were quite obviously relics of the twenties and thirties, now falling to bits, and shown off by the long-dead supermodels of the inter-war years.

The ones below are my favourites, chosen largely on the basis of cheese quotient, starting out with a couple of very sports casual dressers. Poor chap in the Wendy pattern is doing his best to strike a pose, but his lady friend has seen it all before.

Now these two ladies know how to have fun. Look, they’ve even knit some bobble hat cosies for their tea pots. I particularly like the hat on the egg. It looks like one of the Flumps.

The two in the left-hand pattern below are sharing some secret joke about the cactus and whoever it is they’re looking at. Where has the blue woman got her arm?

The woman in the Wendy pattern is clearly trying out for Howard’s Way.

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