Knitting while walking

was once very common. There are a good many early examples of this. People (men as well as women) knitted socks and gloves, shawls and garments as they went to and from their places of work. They spun wool and knitted it while tending the sheep and much more. 

Someone posted a picture recently of a woman doing this and mentioned she could not knit without actually looking at it. Obviously these people, mostly women, did.  

I saw many women actually doing this when I was a mere kitten. Every female teacher I knew in primary/junior school and every rural female teacher I knew in secondary school knitted while on yard duty. Teachers had to do yard duty by law but in rural schools the discipline problems were, for the most part, minimal. The female staff could safely knit. If something did go wrong they merely handed the knitting over to a child and dealt with the grazed knee or the knocked elbow.  

In this way my mother and the other female staff kept their families in warm winter woolens. They knitted for their children, for the men in their lives and sometimes for those who were not able to knit because of physical or intellectual limitations.  Even children knitted. I remember the pink "jumper" (pullover/sweater) one of the year five students had knitted. It was mostly garter stitch and there was a glaring mistake in the front. I suspect her mother had knitted the bands but the rest was her work and she wore it. 

By the time I was in secondary school I was expected to do plain knitting, Most of the girls I went to school were expected to do the same. We might not have reached the dizzy heights of "stockings" and "socks" and gloves that the previous generation knitted for the troops but we could knit. We all used the cheap, hard wearing wool that was sold by the department stores or at the local draper. There was even a "wool bank" in some places where people could buy their wool a skein at a time. (Yes, you wound it yourself for the most part.)

The local draper was just a couple of hundred metres from my paternal grandparents home. I would go there with Grandma and watch the "flying fox" being used by the assistants as they took the money from the customers. I could safely wander around the counters laden with zippers and buttons and cotton. The fabric was stacked in rolls against the walls. 

On the right hand side were the boxes of yarn. I suspect it was mostly, if not all, labelled with the beehive of what is now Patons but once had the Baldwin name as well.  When I was around eight there was a very large amount of angora brought in. I remember Mum and Grandma and many other women standing there as the manager/owner of the shop spoke to them. Even on "special" it was probably expensive because Grandma had been asked to make something from it in what was clearly an economical way.  That year every little girl seemed to have an identical green or yellow bolero made from two rows of angora and two rows of sock yarn. I still have the pattern somewhere but, alas, the angora is no more. 

People still knit of course. I am going to help at our state show today. There will be some lovely knitting to display. I doubt that those who have done the knitting will have done it while walking. They do it as a hobby now, not a necessity.