WW1 Memorial Quilt – Arthur

This week I have been knitting a filing cabinet!  There are a lot of knitting blogs out there but I doubt if any of the others contain that line. 

This is the next piece of my knitted quilt.  It is to remember several of my relatives who died in World War 1, but it is named after my third cousin twice removed – Arthur Edward Jones who was a Lance Corporal in the 6^th battalion of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry.  He was killed on 30 July 1915 aged 26.  Arthur was a clerk.  His brother and brother-in-law were also killed during the war.

My second cousin three times removed John Frederick Stenner was also killed. He was in the Grenadier Guards and was killed on 2 Oct 1916.  He was only 19 when he died but he had done office work as a young boy in 1911.  His cousin Edward Henry Stenner (who is also my second cousin three times removed was also in the Grenadier Guards and a clerk in civilian life.  He died on Christmas Eve 1914.

I don’t know what the occupation of “clerk” suggests to you – perhaps piles of paper, but I thought of a filing cabinet.  I am not exactly sure what a contemporary filing cabinet would have looked like – I looked at a few antiques online – and it seems it is likely to have been made of wood – so I decided to use brown yarn.

Originally I had thought of green.  I have an old green metal filing cabinet – but I think it is only about 50 years old rather than 100.  I think I will be using green yarn for other occupations – such as labourer and gardener – so I decided on brown for this piece.

For Arthur I cast on 67sts using my main colour  Shade 145 and then knitted 6 rows in the darker brown  Shade 169.  I used red – Shade 150 to outline the drawers which are knitted in light brown – Shade 157. The handles are the main shade again – and I used Shade 177 for the labels.  I knitted three columns of 4 drawers with 2 rows of the darker brown between each row, 2 sts each side and 3 sts between the drawers. There are 99 rows in total.  This is exactly the same size as Caleb – the first piece I knitted and at the moment – I intend them to be placed at opposite corners at the bottom of the quilt.

I drew the design on graph paper but once I had done the set up row to get the first row of drawers in the right place – I did not really need to refer to the diagram.

Now I am going to start knitting a piece to remember the printers and compositors in my family.