๐งฆ Knit your bit: how the Red Cross changed knitting
Published about 15 hours agoย โขย 6 min read
โThe impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.โ
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
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Knitspiration
๐งฆ Knit your bit: how the Red Cross changed knitting
Today is Veterans Day here in the US.
It began as Armistice Day, for the moment World War I ended at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918.
In 1954 the name changed to Veterans Day, so the day would honor everyone who has served.
So today feels like the right day to tell you how a war, and the Red Cross, changed the way we knit.
A few years ago I recorded an interview with knitwear designer and author Elizabeth Lovick.
She edited a book called Centenary Stitches, with more than 70 patterns based on the clothes people wore during World War I.
Those clothes were knitted for a film called Tell Them Of Us, the true story of one English family in the war.
More than 100 knitters from the UK and the US helped make them.
We talked about a lot of things (we always do ๐), but the part about the Red Cross stuck with me.
Where the Red Cross came from
It started with a Swiss businessman named Henry Dunant.
In 1862 he wrote a book asking every country to set up a relief society, with volunteers trained in peacetime so they'd be ready to care for the wounded in war.
The next year, he and four other men in Geneva started the committee that became the International Committee of the Red Cross.
In 1864 the first Geneva Convention agreed that wounded soldiers would get care whatever side they fought on, and that medics would be left alone to do their work.
British ambulance stores at Metz during the Franco-Prussian War, 1870 (via Wellcome Collection)
Today there are Red Cross and Red Crescent societies all over the world.
So what does any of this have to do with knitting?
Well, in the early 1900s the American Red Cross became known for something else...
I watched an 1874 sock machine come apart down to the last screw, and a UV light found its original gilding then it was remade as decals, gold star and all. Hand
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