THE HISTORY OF YESTERKNITS!

It all began back in 1986. By chance I wandered into a charity shop and picked up a classic knitting pattern, Marriner No 64. This leaflet combines quality fashion photography with history and useful technical information. The pattern cost next to nothing to buy and store and would usually have been thrown away. I should also say that part of the interest lay in the humour of some of the old photographs of people modelling for knitted garments such as swimming costumes and artefacts such as the knitted tea cosy! I guess it also helped that the love of my life, Barbara, was a very good knitter and that I had always been interested in design, although mainly of the architectural variety.

For the next couple of years I spent ages (and quite a lot of money) visiting charity shops across the UK, wherever we happened to go and whenever they were open. My friends and relations put up with all this as best they could.

When I had accumulated about 10,000 pre-1960 patterns - that is, ones which were a little more difficult to find - I arranged for some to be knitted up for sale. I was also amassing, by this time, thousands of duplicates, enough to take to craft fares for sale. It was about this time that we hit on the name "Yesterknits" and I began to find publicity fairly easy to attract - a man interested in the history of knitting. This helped me to obtain more patterns, mainly through the post, and generally to set about trying to save the history of knitting - patterns, wool, shade cards and the original garments themselves. I was also accumulating a large number of crochet patterns along with the knitting designs.

In 1988 I contacted several museums to see if they would like to organise an exhibition on the subject, using some of my collection. Springburn museum in Glasgow, a community-based museum, agreed to support the project. They helped design the frames and the overall purpose of the exhibition which included involving local people in lots of knitting events. When the exhibition opened in December 1989 there was plenty of publicity partly because Glasgow was to be "European City of Culture" in 1990. Springburn museum soon found that they had a very popular event on their hands, especially for middle aged to elderly women from all sections of society.

Later in 1990 I visited the annual trade fare of the wool spinners. I took with me some of the exhibition frames and boxes of duplicates. Everybody was very impressed and most of the companies there gave me permission in writing to reproduce their older patterns. Patons and Baldwins also gave me open access to their archives and another company, Templeton's, gave me their archive altogether.

From mid 1990 to the end of 1991 the exhibition visited several other sites in Scotland including the Edinburgh City Art Centre. I was on television talking about the exhibition and even knitting - but very slowly! I also received a good deal of publicity in women's magazines over this period and gave several talks on the history of knitting to women's groups using slides of the exhibition.

All this activity led to hundreds of parcels of old knitting patterns arriving in the post (the postman took early retirement) and many requests for copies of lost patterns e.g., a sock pattern apparently lost in an air raid in 1943! Barbara and I attended a knitting fare in Glasgow and were easily the most popular stand. By this stage there were probably nearly 250,000 patterns in the collection.

However, the income was only just meeting expenditure, no matter what we did, and the time involved in the whole (non profit-making) business was making it almost a full time job. Also, the house was gradually filling up with thousands of duplicates because so many of those arriving through the post were now already in the collection.

We therefore decided in 1992 to take a break until, five years later, the internet came along. A friend Tom McNab and I could see it was perfect for Yesterknits and as Tom could build web sites we set up the site in September 1997. Just over one year later the site had received over 25,000 'hits' and, as the idea was proving so popular,18 months later the 'yesterknits.com' site was opened with a shopping function and 2500 pictures from which to choose copies of knitting and crochet patterns. The freebies pages and 'special features' pages were added a few months later but then no changes until 2005, when there are plans to add lots of new patterns. The original site from 1997 was closed last week and the site simplified, removing the guestbook, bulletin board and newsletter.

In 2000 Yesterknits was set up as a small business; in 2001 a large collection of patterns added to the collection from a shop closing down in central London, adding many designs covering the period from the late '60s to the early '80s.

In 2001 a Yesterknits museum was open for six months in the centre of Edinburgh. It was closed because the business is only viable over the internet. The museum demonstrated that there is not enough people to support Yesterknits, even in a city such as Edinburgh where there are so many tourists.

Sid, the dog, liked the smell of vintage patterns but sadly died a few years ago now. Ewan, to whom all this will be passed one day, was five years old when this photograph was taken. He is now 12 years old. Barbara is happy to benefit from the holidays on which we spend much of the income from the business.

Chris Bacon, December 2004.