‘A Stitch in Time’ has had quite a venerable history.  It goes back to 1970 when (from a remote relative, Daisy Groombridge-Harvey,)  Jane inherited a huge collection of women’s magazines and knitting patterns, dating from the 20s to the early 60s.

Browsing through them, back home in Waterloo, she started seeing how women’s knitwear gradually changed over the decades, reflecting not only the way women saw themselves, but also external factors, such as the scarcity of materials found during the war years.  ‘This could make a book’, she decided, and the original version of ‘A Stitch in Time’ was published, to great acclaim, by Duckworths in 1972.

Hand knitting was almost completely out of fashion at that time, and Gerald Duckworth, realising that he had better make a bit of a splash, launched it in some style at his head quarters, the Old Piano Factory. Here are three typical reviews:

‘Jane Waller thinks [her book] has three contributions to make. First, as a record for posterity of the old patterns which, she says, ‘”show a care and devotion to detail and adornments which one rarely finds in modern garments or even modern knitting patterns”; secondly, as a fashion history of the three decades for students of knitwear; thirdly, as a practical knitting book for today’s home knitter.  […] a valuable fashion record.’

(Alison Adburgham, The Guardian, 12/11/72)

‘The old piano factory in Gloucester Crescent, Regent’s Park, was fairly humming yesterday; the pianist strumming out Ivor Novello and Noël Coward on the old piano was wearing a scarlet and navy knitted bathing dress with romper legs, but no beach ball, over his trousers and flowered shirt (“much too cold in here for anything less”) …. we were all packed in for a fashion show of models wearing knitted numbers from ‘A Stitch in Time’, a collection of authentic knitting patterns from the twenties, thirties and forties, published yesterday by Duckworths.

The audience was almost as eye-popping as the woollies. [..] The clothes themselves, from cami-knickers to crochet jerkins, were beautifully made, and right up-to-date – only surely never in the history of fashion have there been models so skinny as today’s?’

(The Times Diary, 10/11/72)

Jane, a sculptress, was inspired to write her treatise on knitting with the original patterns and modern yarn equivalents, by a giant pile of old fashion magazines she found in a country cottage.  The book is an inspiration to knitters and fashion students.’

(Janet Street-Porter, Evening Standard, 13/11/72)

This was Jane’s first book, and it did well enough for Duckworth to bring out a paperback version in 1982 as well as publishing a further three over the next ten years: Some Things for the Children (1974); A Man’s Book - Fashion in the man’s world in the 20’s & 30s (1977); and The 30s Family Knitting Book (1981).   In all of them, she included a social history (researched from a variety of sources, not just the magazines, so that the readers could learn about fashion within its wider, contemporary context).

By this time, Jane’s work was well enough known for it to be recommended to people looking for authentic-looking vintage     knitwear, as is shown by the following letter to TV Times, Sep 1984.

I thoroughly enjoyed the latest series of ‘Shine on Harvey Moon’ and was very interested in the different hand-knitted jumpers and cardigans worn by the female cast. Is it all possible to buy the patterns for these garments?   Mrs F. Routledge, Cumbria

The wardrobe supervisor for ‘Harvey Moon’ bought and hired original Forties sweaters for the programme. But for those who are interested in trying their hands at these intricate patterns, there are two books on the market both edited by Jane Waller and published by Duckworth. They are ‘A Stitch in Time’, and ‘The 30s Family Knitting Book’.

Annoyingly, Duckworth’s were unwilling to pay the extra money to have the garments knitted up and photographed on contemporary models in full colour. In fact they didn’t even use colour for the cover of The 30s Family Knitting Book, ending up with as inauthentic looking a 30s family as you could possibly imagine.

Three years later things were looking much better, when Thames and Hudson brought out The Man’s Knitting Book.  Full colour pix of dishy young guys looking good enough in their vintage knits to merit a double page spread in Gay News.  The cover, however, featured Edward Fox (best known for having played King Edward V111 on TV in 1978) who certainly knew how to wear a fair isle  with great panache but wasn’t likely to attract a younger readership, whether male or female.

Sadly, this book did less well than expected, and  Jane gave up this line of writing, concentrating on ceramics, children’s fiction and other types of non-fiction.   But she had always had in mind one final knitting book, to be dedicated to the 1940s.

Jump forward 22 years, to 2006, and The Crowood Press - for whom she had already written her two books on ceramics: Colour in Clay (1998) and The Human Form in Clay (2001) - brought out Knitting Fashions of the 1940s: Styles, Patterns & History.

Now back in the 80s, when her previous knitting book came out, the way of promoting books was much as it had been for decades, if not centuries:  the book comes out, the publisher sends a (very often rather miserly) number of copies out to people who they hope will review it, you hope that the reviews - if any - will be good, that bookshops will stock it and that people will buy it and recommend it to their friends.

Of course that still goes on (though writers hoping to be published one day should be aware that the shelf life of a new book often rivals that of an avocado). But what has changed in the 21st century is that people who are really enthusiastic about something like knitting will blog about the topic, with the result that a favourable mention of a relevant book will hurtle through the blogosphere from fan to fan, with links to reviews, the publisher’ website and so on, right round the globe in no time at all.

In addition to this, Jane promoted her book at various Knitting & Stitching events, at one of which she met the talented and altogether admirable Susan Crawford, founder and editor of knitonthenet.com.

Susan, for a long time, had been a fan of the 1972 A Stitch in Time (copies of which had, incidentally, been selling for silly figures on E-Bay and the like). And the result of this encounter was that Susan, and her husband Gavin (a computer whizz-kid from a family of printers) set up their own publishing house, their first publication - in 2008 - being an all-singing, all-dancing, full colour update of A Stitch in Time, subtitled Vintage Knitting and Crochet Patterns 1920-1949, with the artful addition of Vol.1.

And now Volume 2 is out, a very impressive hardback edition, again - as in Volume 1 - featuring a range of colour photographs taken by Susan herself; just look at the cover photo at the top; and click here to see a full range of photos of garments knitted up specially for the new book, from 1930 to 1959.