Historic Knitting – Lynne Pascoe

Name: Historic Knitting – Lynne Pascoe
Start: 2023-10-07
End: 2023-10-07
Location: Cedar Room

Maximum participants: 40

A collaborative session involving a presentation, discussion, and hands on learning. Just how do you start to knit a garment that has a history? We will discuss where you might find accurate information, available patterns (or not), appropriate materials, and often best educated guesses. Lynne will lead you through a recent project to knit cardigans for Memory Lane Historic Village, an award-winning living history museum depicting coastal rural life in Nova Scotia during the 1940s, and discuss other challenges she has been given over the past twenty years.

Lynne Pascoe

Lynne Pascoe has been a hand knitter since childhood, a machine knitter for almost fifty years, and a teacher since her teens. A lifelong love of knitting led to the opening of a cottage industry in the beautiful Margaree Valley of Cape Breton Island. Training local knitters, developing patterns, and researching traditional ways of knitting have become the cornerstones of Sheep’s Clothing.

In 2000 Lynne fell in love with the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia and purchased the oldest house in Ship Harbour where she now lives and has a knitting studio. Her love of old houses is coupled with her love of historic clothing and Sheep’s Clothing has, as its focus, traditional knitwear and reproductions of historic clothing for living history museums, reenactors, and the film industry.

Lynne develops patterns from samples, photographs, or descriptions, and produces a prototype for each item which is then individually crafted either by hand or machine.

Her affinity for knitting and bicycles has been featured at The Old School Gathering Place, The Deanery Project, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in the show 2 Wheelers, and at the Cape Breton Centre for Craft and Design in the Children’s show I Spy. “Young Nessie”, developed for the I Spy gallery show, is now on display in her studio in Ship Harbour.

Lynne also teaches hand and machine knitting in person, and on-line since Covid has restricted in person classes. She is always willing to discuss techniques and tricks when you come to visit, so bring your knitting along and pull up a chair.