My first foray into vintage patterns came from flipping through the box my mother-in-law had accumulated over her decades of knitting. She had so many, such a wonderful collection, that I took my 50 or so favourites to a copy shop. Shhh. Don't tell the Copyright Council.
Since then, I slowly started accumulating them by browsing through the patterns available at the many op shops (charity organization thrift stores for you Americans) in Napier. Most available are pretty beat up, or scribbled on, or not all that vintage, but occasionally I have a great find.
But then I hit the mother load. Next door to my office building (yes, I have a day job) is the Maidens & Foster Auction House. They do estate sale auctions once a week, so each week I go and have a poke around. One visit I came across four huge boxes of loose leaflet vintage knitting patterns! Not organized in any way, not even stacked nicely, just a jumble in these boxes. I didn't have enough time on my lunch break to have a proper look through them, but I knew I had to have them, even if only a few of them were in decent condition. So I placed an absentee bid (not being able to leave work for long enough to attend the auction in person), and I won!
When I picked them up and brought the boxes up to my office, my workmates and I had great fun looking through them. It quickly became apparent that there were many duplicates, which would have been strange obviously if they had been part of someone's personal collection. They also seemed in most cases to be unused (no writing on them, few folds or tears, no other signs of wear from use). Almost all of them were stamped with the name of the same old Napier wool shop (yarn store for you Americans, New Zealanders call all yarn 'wool' never mind the actual content). Woolcraft Wool Shop on Emerson Street (the centre of town) closed many many years ago, according to my locally-living mother-in-law. My best guess is that when the shop originally closed someone acquired all these patterns, and then left them in their attic untouched for years, and then finally either died or decided they didn't need them after all and put them up for auction.
And that's where the bulk of my literally thousands of vintage knitting pattern came from! I had one more major acquisition recently at the auction house when a local knitter died and her huge personal collection was offered, along with her entire yarn stash. There was too much competition for her wool, so I didn't get any of that, but no one else wanted her patterns. How crazy is that?! Perhaps as crazy as I am...
