Whispernet Research...Romancing Knitting

 A stack is forming on my desk.  There are cards to send and give, one finished book, one in progress and one that promises some research for my Colonial Ancestors.  There are other books waiting in the wings including the ones on my Kindle.  I've enjoyed having a Kindle, but like so many who grew up enjoying the feel of turning pages, I still love real books and I will continue to stack them as well as store the whispernet ones. 



I could write a good deal about the books I've read lately, and expound on the ones that are in progress, but this is not a book review.  However, you might be interested to know how I go about choosing what books to read and which ones I pass on and why, but I won't go there either for fear you'd be bored out of your skull and be convinced that I don't have a brain in mine.

It's pretty obvious that I read many things that have to do with Love and Needlework.   I do read Romance novels and if they have a Stitching Love thing going on, too...all the better.

I used to read really trashy romance novels with the justification that they were historical and the research...historical...was invaluable to my own writing...which was light years away, but hey...I was stacking and storing and wouldn't dare whispernet a word of that history to anyone.  Which brings me to the surprising and  unexpected  historical research material I can actually use in the writing of my Colonial Ancestors...from of all places....The Whispernet!   That's where I found this History of Knitting book.  It's just mind blowing to find any recorded accounts of knitting since it was so much a part of mundane daily life that it was seldom mentioned in journals, diaries and letters. 

Who knew that  my 5xGreat Grandmother's sock knitting history would find it's way to 'Tracks of My Georgia Ancestors' some 250 years later.  But, that's exactly what's going to happen as soon as I've finished reading and gleaning the chapters on Colonial Knitting, Knitting for Liberty and Knitting in the Circle of Domesticity.

In works of labor or of skill

I would be busy too;

For Satan finds some mischief still

For idle hands to do

Isaac Watts, Against Idleness, 1732



I am sure that Mary Polly recited this poem with every knit and purl stitch she knitted into the scratchy, wooly socks for her first born son, Buckner.  Here's the first in a series of posts on Buckner Pittman....click on Title.

Colonial First Born Son and Revolutionary Soldier