About

Recovering the overlooked. Pulling the thread until something hidden comes into the light.

The name means something.

Marvellous

Because the corners of knitting history are full of things that are extraordinary but unknown. Women who ran successful businesses, invented tools, wrote bestselling books, and shaped Victorian retail culture — but whose names disappeared from the record. Uncatalogued archive boxes that no researcher has opened in decades. Pattern books that contain, hidden in their prefaces, rich evidence of class, gender, and social aspiration in early Victorian Britain. The marvellous is everywhere, if you know where to look.

Mechanical

Because this blog sits at the intersection of making and technology. Knitting machines, computers, digital humanities methodology, corpus analysis tools, Brother 950i punch card knitting. The technology of making things, in every sense — and the tools that let us make sense of the past.

Yarn

Because it means two things at once. Yarn is fibre — thread, the raw material of knitting and making, the physical stuff that Victorian women used to build businesses and livelihoods. But yarn is also a story — the kind you tell slowly, pulling the thread until something hidden comes into the light. This blog follows both kinds of yarn: the material, and the stories of the people behind it that are still waiting to be told.

I'm Sally Kentfield. I'm a software quality engineer at Xbox Game Studios, an MA historian, and a researcher specialising in the history of Victorian craft publishing and women's economic lives. My MA dissertation research contributed to the published Oxford Dictionary of National Biography biography of Frances Lambert (1798–1880) — needleworker, author, and one of the most successful craft book publishers of the 1840s, largely forgotten until recently.

I'm a proofreader for the Knitting & Crochet Guild's Slipknot journal, a committee member and speaker at the Knitting History Forum, and an independent game developer at Granny Tubs Games.

This blog has been running since 2013. It contains research writing, knitting machine experiments, historical essays, and occasional pattern translations from Victorian originals. 

If you've found your way here through the Knitting History Forum, the Knitting & Crochet Guild, or a search for Frances Lambert — welcome. You're in the right place.