A fun vintage cat picture for knitters. With yarn wrapped around it’s feet and the unfinished knitting project laying nearby and ignored, this cat playing with yarn is a great image for both cat lovers and knitters. Our family always seemed to have weird pets. It was our dog who had the yarn ball as their favorite toy. She loved to pull and rip at the threads as if she was digging for treasure. Our cats would seem ever indifferent to yarn but every now and again we would wake to find the yarn ball totally unwound and wrapped around the legs of chairs and tables. Obviously someone had had a lot of fun the night before.
This colorful vintage image dates back to 1881 when it appeared in the work Holly Berries. The artist was Ida Waugh (d.1919).
A tabby cat playing with yarn must have been an image that worked well in children’s books of the late 1800s or Waugh tended to make similar drawings for different books. This image was first added to Reusable Art in 2008. In 2014, I found another Waugh drawing of a cat playing with yarn. The drawing isn’t the same quality as this one though it is bigger and they might work quite well together. It can be found here – playing with kitty.
This image is copyright free and in the public domain anywhere that extends copyrights 70 years after death or at least 120 years after publication when the original illustrator is unknown.
