Archiving scans of Ukrainian/Russian crochet magazines

Pinterest is one of the more tolerable social media sites for me, though it’s really not all that “social” in terms of user-to-user interactions. It’s also not great as a “media” site, as far as properly cataloguing the history of a piece of media and who created it, if you think about it. So many of the pinned images are improperly attributed or completely missing attribution to the creators.

I found several scanned pages of a Ukrainian crochet magazine (Russian language), Duplet, which contained all sorts of gorgeous crochet lace patterns. These patterns were fully charted, which meant that someone like me, who has ZERO ability to read Russian, could use them. I have a ton of practice deciphering visual design instructions, beginning as a kid with learning origami from a Japanese kit (no English text) with very detailed pictures, so your mileage may vary.

I particularly fell in love with this insertion lace pattern that incorporated a twisting cable and floral elements in the texture.

Following the links to the pins’ sources mostly took me to Russian-language pages that Google Translate made comprehensible, specifically to Russian LiveJournal, where users would host the scans for an entire issue of Duplet in one journal entry, so that they would all display on the same page. Some of these pages referred back to the Duplet magazine’s website – and that website is notably offline. Searching around the English-language Internet for any translations, I also noticed a lot of broken links. I got the sense that these scans were rather tenuously archived, so I downloaded the pages and put them into this site’s Git repo.

You can find the scans that I’ve saved here: [LINK]

Not sure if it’s worth my time to try to find ALL of the Duplet issues that have been scanned, but it sounds like a fun challenge!

[[crochet]] #visual-design

tags:   knitting  | handcraft-industry  | knitwear-design  | crochet  |