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Barbara Belton 1927-2011 |
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Barbara Belton1927-2011With great sadness I have to tell you that my mother, Barbara Belton, passed away on Thursday last at the age of 83. Barbara had been in hospital for a few weeks. We started Busy Bee Basics on April 16th, 1988 – that’s 23 years and well over 350 machine knitted garments ago, every one of them designed and knitted by Barbara. Knitting had always been her passion and fortunately she had space to set up quite a few machines at home - it was quite usual to go into her workroom to find two garter carriages chugging away on two punchcard machines, the electric motor whizzing the carriage across on her Brother 940 and Barbara doing a bit of knitting on the Chunky 260 in the corner. As for yarn – you name it, we’ve probably still got it. The last knitting exhibition that Barbara attended was at Rochdale last October; I did suggest that maybe the terrible weather was too much and that perhaps she should stay at home, but Barbara was having none of that. She never ran out of ideas for new patterns and it was frustrating for her not to be well enough to continue to design, but she loved attending the exhibitions and meeting all her friends.
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