Mrs Miniver and the Plateaknits

Ingrid with the Giant Jeeves and Wooster Sock © Giles Babbidge Photography

If you're in London this month, pop along to Prick Your Finger which is a brilliant and quirky yarn and haberdashery shop in Bethnal Green in London. I'm lucky enough to have an exhibition up in their window for April entitled 'Mrs Miniver and the Plateaknits'. The shop is run by Louise Harries and Rachael Matthews (who wrote a great piece for us in this issue: Louder than Bombs). I went up to London last Wednesday to put the show up with lots of help from my chap, Giles who was also kind enough to document it all for me. Rachael and Louise and their shop staff were lovely and made us very welcome with cups of tea throughout the day and put on a great private view in the evening.

I’m showing both a series of socks called the Mrs Minivers which talk about relationships between people (both real and ficticious), and also the final pieces from @platea's online art performance on Twitter this past January: #plateaknit. The performance crowdsourced a knitting pattern through Twitter and makers interpreted tweets into finished knitted items: I made two hats, wrist warmers and a scarf from them.

In the photograph at the top, you can see one of my Jeeves and Wooster socks. I used a 1930s pattern called 'The Wondersock' which has detachable toes and heels to save on darning: the idea is that you just knit more when they wear through. A clever idea and quite strange to knit: they really only came together to look like socks when I sewed them up at the end. They came out absolutely enormous too despite swatching! Did 1930s men have extra large feet??!

The exhibition is on at Prick Your Finger for the rest of April, so if you are in London, please do visit and let me know what you think.

Happy Knitting!
Ingrid