Knitting for Victory

Today a friend of mine asked me for a crochet pattern from many years ago.  Apparently I had made her son a baby bunting when he was born.  I don't remember the pattern or what it looked like, but I thought I would look through my patterns to see if one of them sparked my memory.  It was fun looking through them.  I saw patterns for things I had made.  I saw patterns for things I wanted to make and a ton of patterns that I have no idea why I kept.

Rosie the Knitter

In the stack of books, I came across something that I had forgotten about.  A lot of the stuff I have came from my mother in law who would have been 100 years old yesterday, August 6.   The book I found was called Knitting for Victory.  Apparently during World War I and World War II, people on the home front helped in any way they could.  Many people knit for the troops.  Even Eleanor Roosevelt knit for the war effort when she was the first lady.  She was called the first knitter.  Even children and young adults would knit.  On November 24, 1941 Life magazine ran a cover story about it.  It is amazing to me that the country was so cohesive that everyone backed the troops, and that millions of items were hand knit for the cause.  It would be nice to have some of that patriotism and cooperation in this day and age.

This is a good article discussing in detail how people Knit for Victory.

 http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=5722