New year's eve, Jane and I are browsing a box of old patterns. We're also on the Lidl champagne. Most are for knitters, but Stitchcraft's one for home sewers and I have a vested interest, being in the final stages of a glamorous blue wool coat. It's challenged me - my first conventional lining attached at neck, front and hems and I've unpicked three times at least.
But all it's cost is the lining fabric (£18) because Jane has a stock of beautiful wool given to her by a former student and she passed a length of it to me.
What impresses me, flicking through the mag, Christmas lights on the table, in the tree, around the cupboards, was how this mag, published in 1950, rings true, like a great poem, and we agree, Jane and me, that the skills it fosters are barely talked about. 
We're browsing because I want a new jumper, distracted by Shetland, cable knits, elaborate nordic and traditional patterns which women once knew as a matter of course. And then distracted by Stitchcraft and taking phone pics, until I go off on one about the New Look and Jane disagrees with me saying some women found it offensive in its excess. No, Jackie, she says, it was celebrating a way out of poverty, wartime. And yes, of course that's right. I'm a little on my high horse with the champagne and tired, and maybe too attached to the old dichotomy, the masses v the rich.
So we carry on reading the box that is reminding us of a fraction of what women did, the stitch counting, fair isle, arran, bonnets, shawls, evening dresses and skirts, kids' coats, darts, gathers, ruches, smocking, pleats...
I began my blue coat on Boxing Day and will finish it a few days into 2024. It's been a good use of the limbo time at the turn of the year when my notebook remains untouched. That and the odd walk with Bambi, reminding me of what matters - those waves battering the sea wall at Saltdean, and this, Noah's Ark, beached there, police tape fluttering in another gale, a warning of sorts.
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