skip to primary navigation skip to content
 

 

Friday fun: homemade hats for heroes « The Polar Museum: news blog

The Polar Museum: news blog

Friday fun: homemade hats for heroes

We’ve been celebrating National Knitting Week at the Polar Museum all week! On Monday, I blogged about a pair of balaclavas that were knitted by the Empress Eugénie and her ladies for the crew of the British Arctic Expedition of 1875-6.

On Tuesday, we welcomed some new woolly residents to the museum: a set of three miniature knitted explorers from the Heroic Age of Scott and Shackleton, together with six huskies, a pony, two sledges and lots of skis and ski poles. These have all been knitted for us by the immensely talented Eileen, and are full of accurate detail:

IMG_6706

You can read more about our new woolly team members and what they will be doing in a new blog by our Education Officer, Naomi.

One of the great things about these figures is that everything they’re wearing has been hand-knitted – including the hand-knitted items! I tied myself in knots this morning, thinking about the meta implications of this (and the possibility of knitting a knitted figure that was wearing a knitted hat…) before deciding that recursive knitting was probably too silly a topic even for a Friday Fun blog post.

PhotoGrid_1444404778118

If you’ve been inspired by these pictures to try out some Heroic Age fashions, then you’ve come to the right place, especially as today is also Woolly Hat Day! While Greta was at the Science and Society conference in Durham recently, she picked up a flyer for an exhibition about Antarctica that is currently on at the Palace Green Library. As part of the exhibition, they are encouraging people to knit hats based on ones worn by Ernest Shackleton and Tom Crean, in order to raise money for the charity Walking with the Wounded. If you would like to join in, you can download the patterns from the website here.

When I saw the pattern, I thought that Tom Crean’s hat in particular looked very familiar. It’s exactly the same hat that he’s wearing in one of our archive photos:

Tom Crean. SPRI Picture Library P66/19/6A
Tom Crean. SPRI Picture Library P66/19/6A

It’s a curious style of hat, more like a snood or hood than a traditional bobble hat. With its decorative tassels at the corners, the designer suggests that it might work equally well as a tea cosy – I’ll report back if I ever get round to knitting one!

A few weeks ago, I came across the Spring 2015 issue of Knitting Traditions magazine, which contains an entire section devoted to knits inspired by the poles. Among the many intriguing and historically-inspired designs are a headband, a pair of socks and a hat. But best of all, there is a pattern based on a pair of mittens belonging to Edward Mackenzie that is in the Polar Museum:

EP12535

I have previously blogged about these mittens, and look forward to comparing this pattern with the actual mittens in our collection!

If you fancy a more modern hat, albeit one that’s still focused on Antarctica, this one allows you to display the entire continent on your crown:

P1030869

It was designed and knitted by Ken Mankoff, a geoscientist at Pennsylvania State University, during a long season of fieldwork in Antarctica. The long days (and nights) at the poles, not to mention the isolation, seem to be conducive to knitting: while researching this article, I discovered the Antarctica Knitters group, who spend their downtime on the ice creating beautiful patterns inspired by the landscape around them.

So, if you’re a knitter, I hope this post has inspired you to knit something polar-themed … and if you’re not a knitter, I promise that the blog will be free of woolly things next week. Happy Knitting Week!

Christina

Comments are closed.