My childhood art, Reminiscing:

[HEPZIBAH]

Having just done a quick catch up with this thread I immediately recognised some of the amusements from childhood. I had a Spirograph but never really got on that well with it. Think I still have it though along with many of the board games I accumulated over the years.

Knitting Nancy, or French Knitting as it was sometimes known, was a great favourite with me and my friends. I too have produced yards of the stuff over the years but I don't recall ever actually doing anything with it. Although I had one (actually probably more than one over the years) of the colourful wooden dolls made for this kind of knitting, my father also made me some that had different hole diameters and numbers of pegs so that different sized tubes could be made. I think the commercial wooden doll type go back to about the 1930's and were made by Spears, but I'd hazard a guess that the cotton reel/ chunk of wood method of doing this kind of knitting has been going on for centuries.