The directions in the original pattern would be familiar to many knitters today, and the style has since become a standard part of the knitting canon, as well as being taken up into traditions across Europe, from Sweden and Iceland to Shetland.

The film and the beaded collar

Sibbern was open about where the idea came from. She had seen the film Eskimo earlier in 1930, and in her own words she “seized the idea” and composed a sweater on the same motif, “a knitted shoulder piece like a wide collar, but otherwise quite plain.” The film was a Danish-Norwegian production with Norwegian dialogue, one of the first sound films made in Norway, and in it the Swedish actress Mona Mårtenson plays Evaluk, a Greenlandic woman, in West Greenlandic national dress, the kalaallisuut.

The collar Sibbern was referring to is the nuilarmiut, which is made entirely of glass beads and worn over the shoulders as part of the women’s national dress. Up to 65,000 beads can be used in a full nuilarmiut, and making one can take up to two years. Glass trade beads were brought to Greenland from the 1600s, first by Dutch whalers and later by Danish and Hanseatic traders. The large collar appeared around 1900, and it was made steadily larger until about 1910 to 1920. When Sibbern saw it on screen, it was therefore a fairly recent part of the dress. The collar was later taken up as a political symbol by the Greenlandic home rule movement.

Sibbern used the shape of the collar but not its colours. The sweater in the original photograph was knitted in light brown, natural white and brown-black, without the bright reds, blues and yellows of the beadwork, possibly because the film was in black and white. In the 1931 pattern, however, “en frisk farve,” a fresh or bright colour, is specified for one of the yarns, so a knitter following the book could have made a brighter version, and the design was also sold as a loose pattern called the “Grønlænderkofte” (roughly “Greenlander sweater”), in white with red and blue.

The launch and the Greenland question

The sweater was launched in several forms within a few weeks. It was first shown in a photograph in the Norwegian magazine Urd, and the hand-knitting pattern was sold as a separate booklet. A machine-knitted version made by P. Christensen trikotasjefabrikk in Drammen was announced in the newspaper Tidens Tegn on 28 November 1930, with a large photograph of Sibbern wearing it, and the hand- and machine-knitted versions were exhibited together at two exhibitions in Oslo that December. Sibbern also offered to take orders for the sweater. The art historian Astrid Oxaal, who came across the Urd photograph by chance and whose 2003 article is the fullest account of the sweater, suggests this was a way of putting home knitters in touch with buyers at a time of high unemployment. Selling one design as a hand-knitting pattern, a factory-made sweater and a made-to-order piece in the same season seems to me a very modern way of launching it.

Oxaal argues that the sweater became known so quickly partly because it was connected to two topics in Norwegian culture and politics at the time. The first was the campaign of Foreningen Brukskunst, an association promoting more beautiful everyday objects, and the sweater was shown at the association’s opening exhibition on 8 December 1930. The second was the dispute between Norway and Denmark over Greenland. The status of Greenland had been debated in Norway since 1916, and Norway claimed the uncolonised parts of East Greenland as a Norwegian fishing and hunting ground. In 1931, Norway occupied part of East Greenland, and more of the south-east in 1932, until in 1933 the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague ruled in favour of Denmark.

Oxaal places Sibbern’s enthusiasm for the design, and even the choice of subject for the film, in the context of this debate and of the wider Norwegian interest in polar research. She ends her discussion by suggesting that, given Norway’s Arctic policy, the “Eskimo” sweater “may perhaps be called an unjustly appropriated Norwegian trophy from a lost exotic Arctic culture.”

What came after

After the Hague ruling went against Norway, the sweater seems to have been largely forgotten there for some years, and the next well-known round yoke in Scandinavia was Swedish. “Blå skimmer” (Blue Shimmer) was designed by Anna-Lisa Mannheimer Lunn in 1947 for Bohus Stickning, a knitting cooperative in western Sweden known for its fine colourwork sweaters, and it became the most popular of all Bohus designs. It is a round yoke cardigan, knitted in the round and cut open at the front, so its construction is similar to Sibbern’s. Bohus Stickning never connected it to the Norwegian sweater, however, and described the yoke as a jewellery-like pattern, and Oxaal points out that its motifs are closer to traditional woven patterns than to the pointed shapes of Sibbern’s design. In her reading, the two are similar only in construction, and the patterning of Blå skimmer is a new and independent design.

In Norway, the round yoke was revived in the early 1950s, again with Greenland as the inspiration. Unn Søiland Dale, who also designed the Marius sweater, now one of the best-known Norwegian sweaters, had earlier sold a similar design with raglan shaping to an English yarn company while working as a model in London. She then began a series of “Eskimo” sweaters with round yokes, and the inspiration is said to have been a 1952 photograph of the Danish royal family in Greenlandic dress, in which she mistook the beaded collars for knitting. In Norwegian, Eskimo-mønster (“Eskimo pattern”) is also used more broadly for any round-yoke pattern with a wide collar across the shoulders and chest and a plain body and sleeves.

Within a few years, round-yoke patterns were also being published in Iceland. A Swedish magazine published a red, white and blue islandströje (Icelandic sweater) in 1956, and the Icelandic magazine Húsfreyjan published the design in March 1957 under the heading “the Swedes call this type of sweater the Icelandic sweater.” At the end of 1956, the Icelandic magazine Melkorka had also published a red, white and blue round yoke, knitted from the neck down, as a Grænlenzk peysa (Greenlandic sweater), so within a few months the same kind of sweater was called Greenlandic in Iceland and Icelandic in Sweden. Knitted in lopi, the lightly spun Icelandic wool, it became the lopapeysa, which after Icelandic independence in 1944 came to be treated as a national tradition.

In Shetland, where knitters were known for Fair Isle, a colourwork style worked in small repeating bands all over the garment, yoke sweaters were taken up from the 1960s. Many were knitted on domestic knitting machines up to the patterned section, and the yoke was then knitted by hand, so that hand knitters could compete with fully machine-made sweaters. In these yokes, small Fair Isle bands, known in Shetland as peerie patterns, were combined with Scandinavian stars.

Sibbern’s own pattern was not published in English until 1965. Her first book, Norske strikkemønstre (1929), a collection of traditional Norwegian knitting patterns, had been translated as Norwegian Knitting Designs in 1952, and the “Eskimo” was added to the 1965 reprint, presented as a Norwegian classic alongside the Setesdal sweater (the lusekofte, black and white with small scattered dots). In this version, the motif is slightly simplified and the colours are black and white, as in the other traditional patterns in the book.

How the 1931 pattern is knitted

This last section is for knitters, and looks at how the 1931 pattern is put together. By the definition used in the previous post, Sibbern’s sweater is a true circular yoke: the yoke is worked as one piece from the neck down to the underarm, with no raglan or set-in armhole shaping, and is then divided into the body and the two sleeves. The collar and the top of the yoke are knitted on four double-pointed needles, and once there are enough stitches to go round it, the work is moved to a circular needle, which Sibbern recommended as a practical simplification. Circular needles were still somewhat of a novelty at the time, and they were rigid, so they could not be used for a small circumference. With today’s flexible cables, the choice of needles for the neck is a matter of preference.

The pattern was included in Sibbern’s second book, Strikkeopskrifter (1931), which was printed three times up to 1939, and that is the version described here. It is written for three-ply handspun yarn in three colours, knitted on 2.5 mm needles. The choice of handspun surprised me after the English-language patterns of the same years, several of which were written to sell a particular brand of yarn. The yoke is widened with wedge shaping, with the increases drawn into the colourwork chart, so that each of the 15 motifs is widened along with the yoke. At the underarm, the front is given 25 more stitches than the back, probably to allow for the bust, and the body and both sleeves are continued in the round down to the hem and cuffs.

None of the patterns I looked at for the previous post were made this way. The nearest, “A Symphony in Green” (1935), has a yoke of the same kind, but its front and back are knitted flat from the bottom up, with armholes shaped for a set-in sleeve, and the pieces are only joined for the yoke.

Sibbern’s method of working the whole sweater in one piece in the round is still used for many circular yokes today, whether from the top down or the bottom up. In the next post, I will look at how the circular yoke was taken up in the English-speaking world from the 1960s, and at how much deeper yokes have become since.

Further reading

Most of the history in this post comes from Astrid Oxaal’s 2003 article, which is in Norwegian. The other sources are listed with what I took from each.

Hreinsdóttir, H. (2010, December 26). Hin eina sanna Eskimó peysa; Í tilefni 80 ára afmælis [The one true Eskimo sweater: On its 80th anniversary]. Blogg Hörpu Hreinsdóttur.
An Icelandic translation and redrawn chart of the 1931 pattern, the separate 1930 booklet, and scans of the Icelandic magazine pages from the 1950s.

Bertram, L. (2015, September 9). Power patterns: Discussing the Icelandic sweater and the Greenlandic nuilarmiut at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Object Lives.
The nuilarmiut and the national dress: the bead count, how long the dress takes to make, and its role as a symbol of the Greenlandic home rule movement.

Klepp, I. G. (2021). Eskimo-mønster. In Store norske leksikon.
Sibbern’s own words about seizing the idea from the film, and the wider Norwegian use of Eskimo-mønster for round-yoke patterns.

Lambert, G. A. (2002). The taxonomy of sweater structures and their origins [Master’s thesis, North Carolina State University].
How the Bohus and Shetland yokes are constructed, and how Shetland yoke sweaters were made with machine-knitted bodies and hand-knitted yokes.

Oxaal, A. (2003). Et norsk strikkemønster fra Grønland [A Norwegian knitting pattern from Greenland]. Kunst og kultur, 86(3), 158–171.
The main source: the Urd photograph, the film and the beaded collar, the launch, the Greenland dispute, and the later round yokes in Sweden, Norway and Iceland.

Sibbern, A. (1931). Strikkeopskrifter [Knitting patterns]. Grøndahl & Søn.
The pattern itself, which the section on how it is knitted is based on.

Spinning Linen

My first linen yarn is off the wheel: 100 g of flax, plied into a loose 2-ply of around 330 m per 100 g. The shop listed it as “combed top” linen, though the description was in Finnish and I am not completely sure what that translates to in English. From the long, smooth fibres, I think it was line flax. I spun it on the Wee Peggy without a distaff or any special setup, treating it much like the wool I had been spinning, except that I spun the singles S, the opposite direction from my usual wool.

I am not suggesting a beginner should start with flax, but I found it much easier than wool for understanding what twist and drafting actually are. With wool, the drafting triangle can feel like a fuzzy haze that suddenly turns into yarn. With flax, because the fibres are so long, I could see individual strands go from untwisted to twisted as they ran into the yarn. Partway through I switched to spinning wet, dampening the fibre as I drafted, which smoothed down the hairiness and was much kinder to my hands.

I found the whole process deeply meditative, to the point where my mind and body felt at one with the wheel. When I was looking for a wheel, most of the secondhand ones for sale near me were old Nordic flax wheels, so it felt fitting to spin some flax myself, even if mine is a wheel from New Zealand. Although I would not associate flax with Finland today, it was grown here from around the 11th century, and from the 18th century until the mid-20th century it was one of the most important crops in the country. Before the 20th century, most rural households had their own spinning wheel and loom, and the textile work was mainly done in winter, outside the farming season.

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This is the first post in a short series on the circular yoke sweater. The form recognised today was most likely first designed by the Norwegian Annichen Sibbern Bøhn, whose Eskimo sweater was launched in 1930, and her design is the subject of the next post. The focus here is on what was being published in English at the same time.

What counts as a circular yoke

In a circular yoke sweater, the body and both sleeves meet at the underarm, and everything above that point is worked as one piece, shaped by increases or decreases spread evenly around it. There is no raglan line and no set-in armhole underneath. The direction of working and colourwork are not part of the definition; the defining feature is that the yoke covers the shoulder with circular shaping. Sibbern’s Eskimo already fits: in the pattern as printed in her 1931 book Strikkeopskrifter, the yoke is cast on at the collar, worked in the round on a circular needle, and divided into body and sleeves at the underarm.

The shaping can be arranged in two ways. In wedge shaping, the increases or decreases are stacked at a few fixed points and repeated every few rounds, dividing the yoke into segments. In concentric shaping, they are spread evenly around the whole yoke on a small number of separate rounds, so that the yoke is narrowed in steps.

The patterns below are some of the earliest English-language ones tagged circular yoke on Ravelry. I was surprised to find almost nothing among them that I would recognise as a circular yoke sweater myself, so I read each one against its original printed instructions to see why it had been tagged that way.

A close contender with wedge shaping

“A Symphony in Green,” from the Australian Women’s Weekly of 23 March 1935, has a back and front knitted flat from the bottom up, with armholes bound off as they would be for a set-in sleeve, but the sleeves have no cap. Ten stitches are cast off at each side for the underarm and the rest are held, and then all four pieces are joined:

“join the four pieces by knitting round on three needles (332 sts.).”

The yoke is then decreased with wedge shaping, at ten evenly spaced points every fifth row, up to the neck. Apart from the armhole shaping and a small buttoned opening at the front, this is close to how an Icelandic or Shetland yoke is built. In the Weekly it was sold as a new shape, with a “new extended shoulder-line” and “the fashionable ‘dropped’ shoulder yoke,” although “dropped” here probably describes the look of the yoke rather than the drop-shoulder construction the term refers to today. The yoke itself is plain green stocking stitch, with a separate lace collar sewn on over the top. I find it quite funny that one of the two nearest things to a modern yoke in the whole group ended up hidden under a frilly collar.

Crocheted yokes

In three of the earliest patterns, a knitted body is combined with a crocheted yoke, each in a different way. In the Laceweave Jumper (Australasian, Melbourne, October 1932), the yoke is crocheted first, round by round like a doily, and the front and back are then picked up from its lower edge and knitted downwards. In “A Very Swagger Garment” (Daily Telegraph, Sydney, November 1933), worked in green silk with stripes of cherry mohair and lemon angora (I wish the photograph were in colour), the yoke is crocheted flat and sewn in, leaving an opening at the front that is laced with a crochet chain. In “Jumper for Summer Wear” (Australasian, November 1934), the body is finished first and the yoke crocheted round the neck afterwards: “Join the shoulders and proceed to work round the neck.” All three have set-in sleeves. Three independent inventions within two years seem unlikely to me, and it is more plausible that the idea was passed around by knitting editors or by the yarn companies and shops supplying these columns.

Knitted yokes on finished bodies

In three more patterns the yoke is knitted but still added to a set-in-sleeve body. “Jumper for the Spring” (Mail, Adelaide, 1934) has a yoke knitted sideways as a striped strip of pearl cotton and angora, “for length to fit around neck of jumper,” and then sewn in, an angora yoke a few years before Bohus made them famous. In “Persuasive Flattery,” a pattern for a jumper named Zelda (Australian Women’s Weekly, 1939), 320 stitches are picked up around the finished neckline, and the maker can choose between a crocheted yoke and one knitted in stranded colourwork “as in ‘Fairisle.’”

The one I find most impressive is the only British pattern here, “A Popular Model” (Wm. Briggs & Co., Manchester, 1938), which Roxanne Richardson knitted and documented in a series of videos. The body is knitted in pieces with set-in sleeves, and short rows are worked across the tops of the pieces to round out a circle at the shoulders. Once it is time to work the yoke, all the stitches are knitted across, increasing every two stitches to three. This brings the stitch count up to the full circumference of the yoke and at the same time closes up the gaps the short-row turns would otherwise leave. The yoke is then decreased towards the neck in the usual way. I think whoever worked out this way of getting a round yoke onto ordinarily shaped shoulders was a genius.

A yoke on a raglan

The other close contender, and the earliest American example in my selection, is the Hamilton Smock Stitch Blouse from the Minerva Yarns booklet Minerva Styles the Future (1936). The yoke is knitted first, in stripes of white, red and navy, and widened with concentric shaping, a stitch added in every three-stitch repeat on every fourth stripe. It is then joined and continued as a raglan down to the underarm, on a “Steel Circular Skirt Needle.” Top-down sweaters on circular needles aren’t anything new, it seems.

This combination of a round yoke with raglan shaping below it is still used today, for example in the popular Ranunculus and Anker’s Sweater patterns. Raglan shaping below the yoke gives the knitter a chance to refine the fit, and when I draft a pattern with a round yoke, I usually take this combined approach.

Taken together

The common feature across these patterns is the body rather than the yoke. The round yoke is usually a fairly shallow band added to a set-in or raglan sweater, closer to a decorative neckline than to the deep yoke used for the whole shoulder today, which is consistent with how dominant the set-in sleeve was: among patterns dated to the 1940s, it accounts for over 90% of those with a construction tag. (If you are interested in the numbers behind this, I looked at how the popularity of each sleeve construction has changed over the last ninety years in 90 Years of Sweater Styles.) I think these garments are better understood as precursors to the circular yoke than as early versions of it. There is also no steady progress across the decade, since the two that come closest were published in 1935 and 1936, and the later patterns went back to other methods.

The number of Australian examples is probably due to the archive rather than the period. Australian newspapers are extensively digitised on Trove, and many of their knitting patterns have been added to the Ravelry database. In several of the patterns the design is also credited to Paris or “overseas,” but none of these claims can be verified, and “from Paris” may have been no more than a way to make a knitting pattern sound fashionable.

Borrowed shaping

Neither method of shaping a round yoke was new in the 1930s. The crown of a hat can be decreased in the same two ways, and so can the toe of a sock or the top of a mitten, although there are plenty of other ways to shape all three. A crocheted doily is increased outwards on the same principle, and nålbound caps and mittens were shaped in much the same way long before knitting existed. The round yoke was most likely an idea carried over from these familiar objects to a new part of the garment, and it is simple enough that a knitter could also arrive at it independently, or “unvent” it, to borrow Elizabeth Zimmermann’s term.

On a more personal note, I find myself wishing that crochet and knitting were still combined in a single garment as readily as they were in these patterns.

Meanwhile, in Norway, Sibbern’s Eskimo had been a true circular yoke since 1930. In the next post, I will look at where that design came from, including the Greenlandic beadwork it was based on and the political context of its launch, and at its later influence on Bohus in Sweden, Shetland yokes in Scotland and the lopapeysa in Iceland.

Even so, I couldn’t quite ignore the pull to produce more, faster. I’ve been working my way through a sample box of naturally coloured breeds, and the 21g of Dorset Horn I recently finished on my supported spindle took about 2 weeks of evening spinning sessions to spin and ply. The finished 2-ply was fine, working out to around 500 m per 100 g, and the thought that a pair of socks in that weight would take me 10 weeks to spin was more than a little daunting.

Granted, spinning has to compete for time with work, chores, other commitments, and my other hobbies, knitting and crochet chief among them, so those 2 weeks weren’t solid spinning either. I’m sure my speed will pick up with more practice. But getting my hands on a wheel became something I couldn’t put off any longer.

A look online turned up around a dozen secondhand wheels in my area, most well over 100 years old: typical Nordic flax wheels, probably stored away in a family cottage for decades. There was an Ashford Traditional for around €400, a 30-minute drive away, and a Rappard Wee Peggy for €330, just 5 minutes down the road.

I’d never heard of the brand, or the wheel, before. Rappard wheels, I learned, were built in Dunedin, New Zealand, their design evolved from Shetland wheels that early settlers brought over with them, and the Wee Peggy was sold as a kit set in the 70s and 80s specifically so it could be posted anywhere in the world and assembled on arrival. This one had well cared for wood, an intact flyer, 4 bobbins, and a built-in lazy kate. I bit the bullet, and 2 weeks ago I became the owner of my first spinning wheel.

Now that I’ve got a wheel of my own, it’s strange to think that spindles were the only way to spin for thousands of years, and that even the earliest spinning wheels still needed a separate motion to wind the spun yarn on, stopping and starting the whole time. That changed with the flyer, the part that spins and winds at once, the same basic mechanism the Wee Peggy still uses. Historians have trouble pinning down exactly when it first appeared, since spinning technology tends to spread long before most people actually adopt it, but by the 16th century treadle wheels built around a flyer were common enough to earn their own names: the Saxony wheel, the flax wheel. Not having to stop to wind on must have sped things up considerably. Whatever that jump in production felt like at the time, it must have been enormous.

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Sweater patterns on Ravelry can be tagged with a sleeve construction: raglan, set-in sleeve, drop sleeve, circular yoke, and a few less common ones. Those tags are added by whoever enters the pattern into the database, not by Ravelry itself and not necessarily by the designer, the same way anyone edits a wiki entry. Ravelry’s search also records the year a pattern is first published, so patterns can be counted by tag and year and compared across time.

About half of sweater patterns on Ravelry have no construction tag at all, so every percentage below describes tagged patterns only, not all sweaters, and a published pattern is also not the same thing as a popular one. In the earliest decades, most of what’s in the database was added because someone happened to catalogue a vintage pattern years after the fact, and Ravelry’s userbase skews English-speaking and Western, which likely affects which patterns appear in the database at all. Read what follows as a rough sketch, not a survey.

Across seven constructions and 96 years, no single construction has remained the most common for more than about twenty consecutive years. The clearest feature of the chart is how much of its right-hand edge is occupied by styles that were negligible a generation ago. A knitter who’s been at it for thirty or forty years has likely lived through more than one of these changes and may have felt a disconnect between what they’re comfortable knitting and what patterns are out there.

Set-in sleeve is the construction behind a tailored jacket, sewn in a curve to match a curved armhole. Despite its dominance in earlier decades, it isn’t the oldest or most “traditional” way to build a sweater. Older, simpler shaping was quite different: a drop shoulder often required no shaping at all, or sometimes there was an armhole gusset added instead, the kind of construction found on ganseys and other older working garments. Those garments were typically knit in the round too, which may surprise some people. Set-in sleeve is essentially the tailoring approach applied to hand knitting, and many vintage patterns share a standard workflow that knitters either love or hate: you knit 4 (or 5, if it’s a cardigan) separate pieces with shaping, sew them together, and see how it fits.

This construction came alongside the rise of commercial pattern publishing: companies like Weldon’s and Patons had been standardizing printed knitting instructions since the early 1900s, at a point when sweaters were still a fairly new everyday garment, and those patterns borrowed their shaping conventions from dressmaking rather than from older, garment-specific knitting traditions. Wartime knitting campaigns pushed that publishing culture further still, and the tailored, close-fitting silhouettes of the 1940s, 50s and 60s suit set-in sleeve shaping perfectly.

Of the tagged patterns dated to the 1940s, over 90% are set-in sleeve, which matches my own experience flipping through vintage patterns from that era. There’s an unexplained rise again in the mid-2000s that I haven’t been able to work out, so if you have any idea what might explain it, I’d love to know. What isn’t in question is the endpoint: set-in sleeve is now the least common of the major constructions among tagged patterns, though there’s a bit more to the story than that, which we’ll get to below.

This is the fun one. If you know what an 80s or early-90s sweater looked like, you already know what a dropped shoulder does to a garment’s silhouette, and the data lines up with that memory almost exactly. Drop sleeve rises from a rounding error to well over half of tagged patterns within about a decade, stays above half among patterns dated to the 1990s, and then falls sharply once the giant-sweater look stopped being cool. It’s risen again slightly in the last few years, likely reflecting the trend for neutrally-coloured, over-sized sweaters (held with mohair, of course), that was all over Instagram a few years back.

Here’s the one I was originally curious about. Circular yoke stayed under 10% of tagged patterns across eight decades and has more than doubled since, and I think the reasoning is quite unique and complex. One of the big contributors to this is the iconic Icelandic lopapeysa that is synonymous with yoke shaping, and of course, Elizabeth Zimmermann’s die-hard advocacy for seamless-knitting. But more recently, the blog and Ravelry era clearly accelerated this trend too, and I have a few thoughts on that. The history of this style and how it’s evolved will be featured soon, and these charts are just a slight detour on the way there.

Contiguous construction originates from the same Barbara Walker and Elizabeth Zimmermann lineage as a lot of modern seamless knitting. Technically it’s a variant of set-in sleeve shaping rather than something structurally distinct, and various designers over the past 20 years or so have refined this construction and put their own spin on it. What is interesting is how fast it’s spreading: it’s grown almost seven times over since 2010, faster than any other construction, although it’s still the smallest slice on the leaderboard below. The rise of video tutorials may have something to do with it, since they make a somewhat fiddly, hard-to-describe construction much easier to tackle. It may also reflect changes in fashion, perhaps people wanting that more tailored look without resorting to the dreaded (by some) seaming.

The trusty raglan is still the most common construction overall, and I know it’s a lot of people’s go-to style. The circular yoke is a close second, while the drop sleeve sits comfortably in third, likely related to the recent uptick. Set-in sleeve looks like it may be struggling, but since contiguous construction is technically one of its variants, its rapid growth might end up boosting set-in sleeve’s fortunes after all.

So there it is: seven constructions, 96 years, and quite a bit more movement than I expected going in. Did any of this surprise you? I’d love to hear if you’ve got your own memories tied to these eras, an oversized 80s jumper, a first raglan, whatever comes to mind. I’m working on a deep dive into circular yoke construction next, so if you’re curious about the history of knitting and its techniques, that’s coming soon.

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Methodology note: this data wasn’t cleaned to account for patterns tagged with more than one construction. That’s probably most relevant for saddle shoulder and contiguous, since both are sometimes tagged alongside a “parent” construction rather than in place of it.

The hat was the easy win of the four. The sweater, the doily, and the stockings all had their own way of humbling me.

FO: Summer Diamond Sweater

This one’s been a long time coming. I cast it on back in June: a sweater in black lamb’s wool and dark violet linen, with a simple tuck stitch worked to throw up a diamond pattern on the purl side. I made this on my vintage push-button Brother machine from the 1960s, and the front, back and both sleeves all flew off the machine within a couple of weeks. A few days later, I grabbed my favourite finishing needle, which happens to be blackened steel, and then got to work with seaming. The black yarn, black needle, and tiny gauge were making mattress stitch a miserable process.

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Goode had called her into the lobby one day and asked whether she thought the dining hall was a proper place for “fancy work.” She told him it was, and that she had no intention of letting him “tyrannise” over her. What made the charge stick, or almost stick, wasn’t the craft itself. In the paper’s own words: “The other female officers were allowed to knit stockings, and the male officers to read books and talk together, but it was only Miss Moss who was accused of insubordination.”

Knitting stockings, plain and useful, made for people who needed clothes, was fine, even for officers on duty. Crochet counted as “fancy work,” and was treated as inappropriate for that reason alone. Men talking and reading wasn’t insubordination at all. The charge was never really about whether her attention was divided while she worked. It was about which kind of divided attention a person was allowed to have, and that seems to have depended on what you were making and who you were.

By the end of the hearing, a resolution calling the whole list of charges “frivolous,” and asking Miss Moss to resume her duties and work amicably with the master and matron, passed by 12 votes to 8, which presumably felt like a real blow to Mr Goode. It wasn’t a clean win, though. She didn’t get permission to keep crocheting, and the whole ordeal was a reminder that in 1867, it was in a woman’s best interest to do as her male superiors said.

The crocheting charge was only one of several brought against her that day: whether she’d searched new arrivals at the lodge properly, whether the men had clean shirts, who’d said what about whom to which guardian. Partway through, Goode complained that Miss Moss had been going round telling guardians he was a poor governor. “All I can say is that she has been held out as a terror to me,” he said, and the room laughed at him. Other guardians called the charges “pettifogging.” Even the chairman, trying to keep order, allowed that gentlemen might call them pettifogging, but insisted they were still charges of insubordination all the same.

Miss Moss’s own defence was that she’d always done needlework in the dining room, in every workhouse she’d worked in, and that spending half an hour sitting there doing nothing was irksome to her or anyone else. Crocheting, she said, was so easy that she could do it in the dark. She’d already stopped, once the visiting committee had raised it with her weeks before, so by the time of the inquiry the whole argument had become somewhat circular and reads to me as if Miss Moss was being singled out.

Technically, the charge against her was disobedience, not craft. Miss Moss had been told what was and wasn’t appropriate by a superior, and carrying on regardless is what had got her in trouble. But crochet wasn’t picked at random. Knitting stockings was common, useful, and already part of the workhouse’s own economy: residents knitted them too, partly to bring in income for the institution. Crochet was a newer craft, only a few decades old in Britain by 1867.

It also carried two quite different reputations depending on who was holding the hook. Among the upper classes it was a genteel accomplishment, a way to show off skill in the drawing room. Among the poor, Irish crochet lace had become a fast, cheap way to imitate expensive Venetian point lace for sale, a trade that grew directly out of famine-era relief work, especially relevant since Liverpool was home to many such refugees. Goode’s “fancy work” complaint could have been drawing on either reputation: that it was leisure-class needlework with no business in a dining hall, or that Miss Moss was making something to sell, on the institution’s time, for her own profit. Unfortunately the report doesn’t make clear which he meant, but he had no doubt it was inappropriate.

Her explanation resonates with me today, and if I was ever challenged on my knitting I’d probably say something similar. Crocheting was so easy for her that her hands didn’t need her eyes or her attention to keep going, which created space in her mind, something people who don’t craft probably find hard to understand.

The hierarchy of crochet against knitting still crops up as a discussion online, though the Victorian context behind it has mostly disappeared. Most non-crafters nowadays see them as a single category of yarn-related hobbies, something people do in their free time, for fun. Our brains like to categorise things and quickly assess people by their clothes and items around them. A laptop open in a meeting reads as diligence, whether the person behind it is taking notes or scrolling through Facebook reels on mute. It’s an object we associate with work, even when it’s being used as a distraction. A ball of colourful sock yarn, on the other hand, instantly stands out as an item that doesn’t belong in the workplace, even when it’s acting as the key to absorbing the information actually being presented.

I think about this every time I’m traveling for work. This past week I’ve been at a large international conference, which means hours a day in an auditorium listening to talks that are fascinating, if highly specialised. I struggle to pay attention no matter how interesting I find them, and my instinct is to pull out my phone and start scrolling. I’m not alone in this: half the room is on their phones or laptops, some replying to emails or working on documents, but plenty on Facebook or tabloid news sites. I can’t read and listen at the same time, so if I’m on the Wikipedia page for the 13th-century Tavastian Uprising, I’m probably not absorbing the talk on structural phylogenetics.

To combat this, I now take my knitting to events like this, and I’m often seen in work meetings knitting away on a sock. Amongst my close colleagues this is no problem; they know I’m a better listener and contributor with my hands busy, and often I’m not the only one. But on international trips like this, networking with peers as well as leaders in my field, I sometimes feel like my knitting reads as unprofessional. A laptop, whether or not there’s any work being done on it, doesn’t get the same look.

Back in the auditorium, none of Goode’s actual objections apply to me. Nobody’s checking whether I searched anyone at the lodge. My sock isn’t going to be sold for a profit I’m hiding from a board of guardians. There’s no superior standing over me telling me to put it away. All that’s really left of the 1867 complaint is the most nebulous accusation: that it doesn’t look like work. Miss Moss had to prove herself against a governor with a grudge and a long list of charges. I doubt I’ll ever be in a situation like that. But the confusion on people’s faces when they see me knitting tells me some things don’t change.

Further Reading

“A Squabble at the West Derby Workhouse,” Liverpool Daily Post, Thu 19 Sept 1867, p. 9.

“Irish Crochet Lace: 150 Years of a Tradition,” Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles.

I think of this as my one-step-before habit, and it’s been with me a while. As a kid it meant sitting through documentaries about huge infrastructure projects, a new subway line being bored under a city in China, that kind of thing. They held my attention just long enough to leave me with more questions than answers. How was the tunnel boring machine built? Who thought of it first? What was the job like before machines like that existed? It must have worn out the adults around me at the time. A career in science keeps the habit fed these days, but nothing in my crafting has tested it so far quite like spinning.

With all of that circling in my head, and knitting itself, especially sweater and sock construction and the history behind them, already taking up most of my attention, I put spinning on a shelf and left it there. I had tried it before, picking up a beginner’s spindle kit a few years back with a small sampler of naturally coloured fibre. The learning curve felt enormous, and I gave up after a couple of tries.

In the last spinning update I mentioned finally getting somewhere with a spindle again. The problem was the merino I’d started with: it kept slipping apart before I could get any twist into it. Swapping to a coarser Swaledale fixed that straight away. Since then it’s mostly been drafting practice, and working out what the word “drafting” even means took longer than I’d like to admit. It’s related to “draw”, as in pulling, which I’m sure I already knew, but the connection didn’t click for a while. There’s more than one way to do it, too, and plenty of beginner videos just say “draft your fibre” without explaining the motion involved, and the ones that do go into it often stop short of saying whether it’s a short forward draw or a long backward one. I’d get different advice each time I searched for help troubleshooting, which left me thoroughly confused. None of that is a knock on the people making these resources: it’s just part of learning something new. It feels impossible at first, and it’s hard to tell what you’re doing wrong from what you’re doing right.

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English and Continental are themselves umbrella terms, and several other named styles fold into one or the other. Within English knitting there’s throwing, flicking, parlour knitting, and Irish Cottage style. Continental sometimes gets called picking, along with German or Swiss style, depending on the source. There’s also Norwegian knitting, which usually means Continental knitting where the purl stitch is worked without moving the yarn to the front, although a similar kind of purl can be done in the English style too. The exact definition of these sub-terms varies from source to source, and they can sometimes overlap.

Already, you can see why the terminology gets confusing. Ann Feitelson, who has studied Shetland knitting closely, put it plainly: “Holding the yarn in the left hand is not ‘continental’, nor is holding it in the right ‘English’. It is just holding it in the left or right hand.” Beth Brown-Reinsel made a related point in a piece for Threads magazine in August 1990: profiling 6 knitters who each used a different method showed how much diversity 2 labels like ‘English’ and ‘Continental’ can paper over.

How people actually knitted in the past follows a clear pattern: styles have shifted around the world within the last 150 years.

In England, the standard account on knitting styles describes a shift: before the 19th century, knitters held the needle braced under the palm. The genteel “parlour style” associated with Victorian ladies, with the needle gripped like a pen, came later and was both slower and less efficient (Richard Rutt’s words, not mine). Many assume that the older style is more similar to how most English style knitters hold their needles today, somewhat like a knife rather than a pen. However, the older method in England was more likely sheath knitting, where the right needle is supported in a knitting sheath worn at the hip or waist. This was also the predominant knitting style in nearby countries, such as the Netherlands, and was favoured by production knitters, supposedly allowing them to sustain a punishing pace for hours. Whether sheath knitters typically held the yarn in the left or right hand isn’t clear from the sources I’ve found, and my own guess is that it was predominantly the right hand, but not as a hard rule, since it’s also possible to knit ‘Continental’-style with a sheath. Penelope Hemingway, a knitting historian, wrote about her own family history, which is a useful anecdote here: she was taught to knit ‘Continental’-style as a child, by her mother’s family, farmers in a remote part of Yorkshire who had stayed outside the reach of the 1870 Education Act and the polite, school-taught ‘English’ style that went along with it. Her family’s experience suggests hand-side wasn’t fixed within England, despite the name.

Swedish knitters are recorded as having knitted with the yarn held in their right hand up until the late 19th century. Hulda Lundin, the state supervisor of craft education, published a manual in 1892 promoting the ‘German method’, where the yarn is held over the left index finger. Because the manual went directly into teacher training, the Continental method became the one most Swedish schoolchildren learned within a generation. The prescriptive knitting curriculum coincided with the decline of a knitting tradition in Sweden, known as two-end (or twined) knitting (tvåändsstickning in Swedish). This technique is worked by twisting two strands of yarn together between every stitch to make a dense, windproof fabric. A characteristic of this technique is that it was knitted with the yarn in the right hand. Of course, there were likely several reasons for the decline of the technique, but discouraging right-handed knitting may well have contributed to it. I haven’t yet tried the technique myself, but it is apparently much more convenient to do it with yarn in the right hand compared to the left. The technique was nearly lost until 1974, when a glove was recovered from a mining slag heap at Falun in Dalarna; researchers later found that over 95% of the knitted objects collected from the same region had been made using the two-end method.

There’s evidence of a similar pattern in Finland, where I currently live and almost exclusively encounter continental knitters. Both left- and right-hand knitting were taught at home in the past, with ‘English-style’ knitting still being passed down as late as the 1950s. Again, teacher training programs prioritised holding the yarn with the left hand, cementing the Continental method across the country. One of the teachers trained this way, Elina Häkkinen, crossed the Baltic Sea and started teaching in Estonia. She then went on to write an influential home economics textbook in 1924 which showed only the Continental method of knitting, which subsequently became the method taught in schools. Depictions of Estonian knitters before this time show them primarily tensioning the yarn in their right hand.

One style of handling the yarn that doesn’t fit neatly into ‘English’ or ‘Continental’ is tensioning it around the neck or off a pin, often called ‘Portuguese’ knitting, though it’s also documented in parts of Greece, Egypt, and South America. It’s hard to know exactly where the style originated, how old it is, or how it spread between these places. In this style, though, the purl stitch is generally the easier, more natural one to work, since the yarn sits in front of the needle, not behind it. That’s almost unthinkable for most English or Continental knitters, for whom purling is usually the fiddlier of the two.

So far, all of the knitting styles mentioned are defined by how the yarn is handled and possibly also by how the needle is held, but there is another aspect of knitting style which we sometimes talk about. This is whether we are knitting Western style or Eastern style, which is a description of stitch mount, meaning which way the working leg of a stitch sits on the needle before it’s worked. Both Eastern and Western knitting can be done regardless of how the yarn is handled or the needles are held. Combined knitting, a term coined by the knitting writer Mary Thomas in 1938, knits the Western way and purls the Eastern way. Western knitting tends to be the prominent style in western Europe and North America, while Eastern and combined knitting are associated with eastern Europe and Russia. As a result, English language patterns generally assume a Western mount without saying so, so a knitter working the other way can end up confused, or with unexpectedly twisted stitches, without necessarily knowing why.

This year I hit a kind of slump: more than 30 pairs of socks knitted, a wardrobe full of sweaters, scarves, and hats, and I noticed I was picking projects for one reason only: something new to learn. Since then I’ve bought a knitting machine, a Shetland knitting belt, a Portuguese knitting pin, and also a knitting sheath.

I tend to get annoyed when I hear someone say a particular knitting style is better or worse than the others. It might be true for that person, but it’s rarely universal. Beth Brown-Reinsel, who profiled 6 different knitters in 1990, admitted that early in her teaching career she started every beginner on Continental, telling them it was faster and better than English. Years of watching students changed her mind. No style, she concluded, is better than another, though some may have certain advantages in particular situations.

For me, I choose a particular knitting style depending on what suits my hands, where I’m sitting, how portable the project needs to be, what materials I have to hand, or simply because of what it means to me. That need to find the ‘best’ way overwhelmed me plenty when I started knitting again, and the same feeling is creeping up now that I’m learning to spin. I sometimes need to remind myself to relax and just do what feels best.

English knitting will probably always feel like home to me, since it’s how my grandma taught me. It’s not my primary method, but when I do use it there’s an added sense of nostalgia. With spindles, supported spinning suits me far better than a drop spindle does, mostly because I’m disabled and spend a lot of time sitting on the sofa, where there isn’t much room for a spindle to swing free. The knitting sheath is a bit impractical for me day to day, since it needs somewhere on my body to tuck into, but the whole point of trying it was to find out what it would actually feel like to knit a fine-gauge stocking the way it would have been done in period, so I’m sticking with it for that project regardless. Plenty of knitters say the Norwegian purl changed their life. For me it’s too much movement for my stubby fingers, and I’ve settled on the combined method when knitting Continental instead.

None of this makes English or Continental meaningless as labels. They’re broadly accurate shorthand for how most knitters in each place actually work today. But these labels don’t tell the whole story about how people used to knit. What looks like a country’s established character may just be a snapshot of whatever one influential teacher or textbook happened to prefer 100-odd years ago, creating a monoculture in place of diversity.

I’m also not saying everyone should go and learn 6 different methods to be knitting properly. You don’t need to always be chasing the single best or most efficient way to do something, whatever that would even mean (the optimising instinct that pushes us toward that is probably capitalism’s fault more than curiosity’s, but that’s an essay for another day). But if you are curious, don’t be scared of trying a method that isn’t yours by habit or upbringing. It might change how you choose to craft entirely, or at the very least it exercises a few muscles, literal and mental, that don’t usually get much use. Either one seems worth it to me.

Further Reading

Beth Brown-Reinsel, “Knitting Traditions: More Than One Right Way,” Threads (Aug 1990):

Richard Rutt, A History of Hand Knitting (1987): description on polite knitting style in Victorian Britain.

Olle-Petter Melin, Methods of Multicolored Knitting (2017): survey of published knitting instructions, including knitting style. Source for information on knitting style in Sweden and two-end knitting.

Nancy Bush, “Tvåändsstickning: Sweden’s Two-End Knitting,” PieceWork (2023): more information on two-end knitting.

Ritva Koskennurmi-Sivonen et al., “Knitting as a Cultural and Bodily Practice,“ Reinventing art of everyday making (2008): description of knitting in Finland, and a survey of knitting styles among contemporary students in teacher training.

Anu Pink, “Knitting Style: The Grace of Noble Ladies or the Speed of Peasant Girls?” Studia Vernacula 11 (2019): history of peasant knitting in Estonia, with details about how knitting style shifted over time.

Written knitting patterns first started to appear in the mid 19th century, during a time when knitting was becoming a popular hobby for Victorian ladies and print media really took off. We’re lucky to have quite a few resources that have been digitised, including many of the “Weldon’s Practical Needlework” leaflets, which are available as facsimile copies through PieceWork.

The first edition of “Weldon’s Practical Stocking Knitter” was published in 1886, and it contains many practical tips for knitting stockings in general as well as quite a few patterns for the whole family. I knew that I wanted to keep things simple, so I looked for as plain a pattern as possible, finally settling on a “Gentleman’s Striped Stocking”, which is completely stocking stitch throughout, with the exception of the cuff.

The pattern calls for 4 oz of grey and 2 oz of dark blue “German Fingering”, which is apparently comparable to yarns on the lighter end of fingering weight today. When I was in Tampere recently I picked up a few skeins of Garthenor Snowdonia, which is a plastic-free high-twist sock yarn which should be suitable. I only have one colour, but I decided to go ahead anyway just ignoring the instructions for the stripes.

I picked out my “#16” needles (1.5 mm or US 000), neglecting the ChiaoGoo fixed circulars I have in that size for a set of four 25 cm (10”) DPNs. The pattern doesn’t specify a gauge, but mine is roughly 11.5 stitches per inch (46 stitches in 10 cm) in stockinette, tighter than anything I’ve knit (by hand) before. The long, thin needles made me feel like I was wrestling a porcupine as I was casting on, something I hadn’t felt since I was a beginner knitter. Combined with the knitting sheath, I felt like all of this was going to be more challenging than I had anticipated.

The booklet doesn’t specify which cast on to use, so I opted for my go-to, which is a long-tail cast on done in pattern. This means for K2P2 ribbing you create both knit and purl stitches as you cast on, as opposed to the standard LTCO which creates only knit stitches. I love this cast on because it works for any knit/purl combination, making it more versatile than a tubular cast on, while retaining a seamless appearance and being a simple process.

With 100 stitches on my needles, it was time to get going with 40 rounds of K2P2 ribbing. I would be lying if I said this didn’t drag on a little bit. I think that’s mostly down to still getting used to the knitting sheath: finding a comfortable position for it took some trial and error, and I’ve settled for now on tucking it into my waistband with the back braced against a couch cushion. I don’t usually wear an apron and I rarely wear a belt in the summer, so I might need to experiment a bit more on finding a way that works.

Once the ribbing was done, it was time for the seam stitch, which turned out to have more going on than I expected.

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From the sixteenth century onward, hand knitting became a serious source of income across the hillier, wool-producing parts of the British Isles: Wales, the north of England, the Highlands, Shetland. Stockings knitted in Swaledale and Wensleydale alone were worth at least £40,000 a year in the 1820s, carried to market at Richmond, Kirkby Stephen, and Kendal, where in 1770 some 5,000 people worked in the stocking trade. Knitting schools opened in York in 1590 and Lincoln the year after, teaching children the craft early enough that speed became second nature. Wherever knitting was done for income, some version of the sheath was used.

In the Dales, sheaths were carved into shapes now catalogued by name: the goose-wing, the spindle, the chain, each valley developing its own profile so consistently that an unlabelled sheath can often be placed within a few miles just by its silhouette. Shetland knitters used a leather pad stuffed with horsehair and pierced with holes, worn as a belt. Women in Aberdeenshire twisted a tight cone of straw. Cornish knitters favoured a long straw cushion they called a “truss.” In parts of America, a goose quill sewn into a scrap of cloth and pinned to the dress was used for the same purpose. The sheath turns up in even stranger places, too: an 1837 medical treatise records a Paris surgeon, in the year 1700, extracting a knitting sheath, several inches of turned boxwood, from a patient who had evidently not been using it to knit.

Wooden sheaths were also often love tokens: carved by young men for the women they intended to marry, dated and initialled, sometimes with a line of verse worked into the wood. “My hart is fixt, I cannot change, I like my choice too well,” reads one from the eighteenth century. Others simply carry a date: 1679, 1728, 1843. Their main purpose, though, was practical: as one long-time collector of them put it, they were “just the thing for poorer people, people who could not afford to stop knitting, and people who had to knit on their feet.” Speed was income, and income depended on never quite putting the work down.

The sheaths that survive into museum collections and private hands are disproportionately the carved, dated, sentimental ones, the ones a family kept in a drawer for generations before giving them to a museum. Plain sheaths, with no heart, initials or love story attached, did most of the actual work, propped at a hip for ten or twelve hours a day, and were worn down, split or simply lost.

By the early twentieth century, knitting for income was already becoming rare. One of the last people in Dent to depend on it, Mary Allen, still used a knitting stick well into the 1900s. A pair of fingerless gloves she made for her brother, heading to France in the First World War, survives today at the Dales Countryside Museum with the words “God be with you” knitted into the pattern. But even as that generation’s grandmothers kept a sheath in a drawer somewhere, the practice everywhere else had been pushed out by fashion, and then policy.

Sometime around Victoria’s accession, upper-class English knitters took up a new way of holding their needles, gripped like a pen, wrist turned, meant to look graceful. A trade paper in 1888 sniffed at the sight of women knitting at a concert, calling it a “new freak,” dwelling on the rings on her fingers and the elegance of her hands and saying almost nothing about her stitches. The style was slower than sheath knitting and less practical, and that was rather the point: it signalled that a woman knitted for pleasure, with no need to earn a wage by it. Working knitters copied the elegant style before they ever gave up their sheaths. School authorities finished the job, steering children away from the supported-needle method on the grounds that it was “harmful to the posture, producing a weak chest and rounded shoulders.” I find it striking that a tool made for earning a living was given up mainly because it looked poor.

The sheath has started to come back in a few places. Gansey knitters aiming for the tight, even gauge used in those sweaters have started picking the sheath back up, or its Norfolk cousin, the “shield,” because when one needle is held steady at the hip, the hands have less to do, which eases strain for many knitters over a long session. Shetland’s leather knitting belt never really went away: Hazel Tindall, holder of the actual, verified world record for fastest knitting (85 stitches a minute, a long way short of the 200 sometimes claimed for the old Dales knitters, but real), still knits with one at her hip.

I have been trying the knitting sheath and Shetland-style belt myself these past few weeks. Something used that widely for that long does not disappear without a reason, and I wanted to find out what a tool built for full-time income knitting still has to offer someone who does this for pleasure, not a living. The belt I have had more practice with, and I can already feel why it persists: it holds the needle steady enough that one hand stops doing two jobs at once, and I feel I can knit for much longer periods than before. The sheath I am still working out, mostly the angle of it against my hip.

The fairest test of a tool like this is to use it for what it was probably used for most: a pair of 1880s-pattern men’s stockings, knitted on 1.5mm needles, as called for in the pattern. I bought the yarn for this last week, and managed to get started over the weekend. If you want to follow along, I will be posting progress on the stockings every couple of weeks, for paid subscribers.

Further reading

Peter Brears, “The Knitting Sheath,” Folk Life 20 (1981–82): academic survey, cataloguing regional sheath types across northern England and Wales from provenanced museum collections.

Irena Turnau, “The History of Peasant Knitting in Europe: A Framework for Research,” Textile History 17:2 (1986): a country-by-country survey of peasant knitting across Europe.

Anu Pink, “Knitting Style: The Grace of Noble Ladies or the Speed of Peasant Girls?” Studia Vernacula 11 (2019), pp. 64–77: on the Victorian shift to “elegant” knitting.

Mary Thomas, “Mary Thomas’s Knitting Book” (1938), excerpted at principlesofknitting.com: the primary twentieth-century account of how sheath knitting was actually done, with a useful modern fact-check of her speed claims.

June Hall, “North of England Knitting Sheaths,” PieceWork (2017): a Cumbrian collector’s account of regional types and the economics of the northern stocking trade.

“The Terrible Knitters of Dent,” Out of the Box Learning / Dales Countryside Museum: the source for Mary Allen’s First World War gloves.

Jeni Hawkins, “A Knitter’s Day Trip: Dales Countryside Museum,“ Modern Daily Knitting (2023): a lovely account of the knitting sheaths and other treasures on display at the museum in the Yorkshire Dales.

Successful Purchases

Finland’s second city lies almost exactly 100 miles (160 km) north of the capital Helsinki, and it’s often referred to as the “Manchester of Finland” (or simply manse) due to its role as the centre of the textile industry in the 19th century. Fibre arts in general are still alive and well in Finland (you can buy decent wool yarns in most supermarkets), but that’s possibly even truer in Tampere than in Helsinki.

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The songs weren’t only to pass the time, but they were actually work songs. One he transcribes counts a flock of sheep down and back up again:

the number falling by one each round of the stocking until it hits zero, then climbing again as the next round starts. The verse tracked the stitch count, so finishing the song and finishing the round supposedly happened together.

Everyone knitted with a knitting-sheath, a curved hollow piece of wood worn tucked into a belt called a cowband, often carved and given as a love token, with a clew-hook on the band so the yarn didn’t dangle. On this rested a real regional trade: a pair of stockings, or a coarse worsted cap knitted for the local market, apparently a full day’s work that sold for three pence. Howitt met a farmer’s daughter reckoned the best knitter in Dent, who could make four of these caps in a day, a shilling’s worth of work for a fortune’s worth of reputation. In the next dale over, Garsdale, the men knitted with such concentration round the fire that they pinned cloths to their shins to keep from scorching them, and would sit outside afterwards to cool off, still wearing the shin-cloths, “making,” Howitt says, “the oddest appearance imaginable.”

William wasn’t the only Howitt writing about this stretch of Yorkshire. His wife Mary set her 1840 novel Hope On, Hope Ever in this same Dentdale, and drew the custom just as plainly: “Old men and young, women and children, all knit. The aged man, blind and decrepit, sits on the stone seat at the door, mechanically pursuing that employment which seems as natural to his hands as breathing is to his lungs.” The old woman of the house knits while rocking a cradle with her foot; the generations in between pick their knitting up and lay it down as the day allows. Nobody in the story finds any of this remarkable. For all anyone there knows, Mary Howitt writes, “the rest of England knit as much as they.”

She also has them already looking back on better days: “though everyone says the trade was better in their father’s time, they still go on knitting, contented in the belief that... the dalespeople will always be knitters.” That’s 1840, seven years before an old man wrote to the Leeds Intelligencer to say much the same thing about his own youth in Wensleydale, a little further north. Every generation in this story seems to have inherited the conviction that the one before it had it better. Some of that is probably just what people in a trade like this always say about the generation before them. But some of it wasn’t imagination: this was exactly the period when framework knitting machines and factory-made hosiery were undercutting hand knitters’ piece rates across England, a real structural squeeze running underneath whatever each generation happened to remember. Both things, it turns out, can be true at once. The trade really was being hollowed out by machinery, and every old man in it still had a tendency to round his own youth up.

The same letter names a specific man, John Coates, whose sole employment was knitting and whose other pursuit was hunting, and describes him knitting while following the hounds at a moderate pace, clearing a hedge or a wall without dropping a stitch. I can’t verify it, and vivid details like this are exactly what fond memory produces whether or not they happened quite that way, but it doesn’t need to be literal to make the point: knitting fit into whatever else was going on, hunting included.

Dent and the surrounding dales like it had a national reputation as knitting country, and they weren’t the only region with one. Wales’s hill country was another. An 1850 account of a Merionethshire hill farm describes the same winter-evening pattern under a different name: family and servants gathered together after supper in the “ingle-nook,” lit by a homemade rushlight that burned barely half an hour before it needed tending, and whilst so assembled they prepared more candles, spun, knitted, sewed, or cut wooden spoons, before the Bible was read aloud and the household went to bed around nine. Different region, different craft list, the same shape: a fixed evening gathering round a single weak light, knitting one of several things everyone’s hands were doing at once.

Knitters still do the same today, we’ve just given it a different name. A knitting club, knit and natter, craft night, whatever you like to call it, is a sitting without the singing, the same excuse to sit with your hands busy and other people nearby, the knitting and the company propping each other up so neither one has to be the reason you’re there.

Howitt had a plain enough word for what the original version was actually for, and it undersells nothing by being so plain: a social assembly of the neighbourhood, “not for eating and drinking, but merely for society.” The songs, the sheaths, the industry, the reputation for speed, all of it ran on top of that one fact, and it’s the same fact still running underneath a knit night meeting in the back of a yarn shop tonight.

Further reading

William Howitt, The Rural Life of England, vol. 1 (1838), "Of Lancashire and Yorkshire," pp. 306–313: Description of “going-a-sitting”.

Mary Howitt, Hope On, Hope Ever (1840), as quoted in Harwood Brierley, “A Little of Mary Howitt,” The Newcastle Weekly Courant, 26 February 1898, p. 2: A novel set in Dentdale.

“Wensleydale Spinning and Knitting,” letter to the editor, The Leeds Intelligencer and Yorkshire General Advertiser, 13 November 1847, p. 3: An old man’s account of his own youth in the Wensleydale.

"Life in a Merionethshire Hill Farm," quoting Cliffe's Book of North Wales, Liverpool Mercury, 10 May 1850, p. 2: A similar evening-gathering on a Welsh hill farm.

WIP: Cat’s Paw Scarf

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The growth of hand knitting in England is closely tied to changes in fashion and in the economy. In the second half of the 16th century, men started wearing breeches and as a result knitted stockings came into fashion. There was demand at almost every level of society, and most of it was met by the poorest workers. Knitting had the advantage of requiring almost no capital outlay: a set of needles, a ball of yarn, and whatever light and time was left at the end of a working day. It could be done while watching livestock, walking to market, or tending a fire. By the end of the 16th century, historian Joan Thirsk estimated there were as many as 220,000 hand knitters in England, comprising roughly thirteen per cent of the pauper class.

A few censuses of the poor survive from the period, and Lesley O’Connell Edwards, whose research on working hand knitters from the 16th to the 19th centuries is an excellent account of this world, draws on these. In Norwich in 1570, fifty-eight of 860 poor women surveyed earned all or part of their living through knitting; 72 of the 926 children in the same survey did too. In Ipswich in 1597, ten women listed it as their sole income. Alongside the poverty, though, the censuses record something else: knitting was a skill that had to be taught, often formally, rather than something everyone already knew. The Ipswich survey records four children listed as ‘goeth to knitting schole.’ They had to be sent somewhere to learn it. The assumption many knitters carry now, that the craft has always passed naturally from hand to hand across generations, is not well supported by the historical record. In 16th-century Britain, knitting was still relatively new, and it had to be deliberately taught.

From the late 16th century onward, civic institutions and charitable donors set up formal arrangements to teach knitting to the poor. Over a hundred such establishments have been traced in England alone. The knitting school in York, one of the earliest, was running by the 1590s with a master and overseers teaching thirty scholars at a time. Thomas Firmin, writing in 1678, proposed that parishes fund schools to teach poor children to spin and knit stockings, not for the children’s benefit, but to prevent them from becoming a burden on the parish. David Davies, writing over a century later in 1795, complained that parishes which neglected to put the poor to work had allowed knitting and spinning to fall out of fashion even in cottages, with mothers no longer capable of passing the skills on.

The Factory Acts of the 1830s required mills employing children to provide some schooling, and the same priorities can be seen in the curriculum of those mill schools. One owner told a government inspector that teaching girls to sew and knit would be ‘of quite as much or more advantage than the mere learning to read.’ The children’s work was expected to cover, or at least contribute to, the cost of schooling. In the Kirkdale Industrial Ragged Schools, reported on in the Liverpool Mercury in 1859, over three hundred children of ‘the lowest class of inhabitants’ attended daily. Boys were taught shoemaking and knitting; girls, knitting and the making of clothing. The school was growing and needed larger premises. The benefit to the children was presented as self-evident, since the children were now off the streets and regularly attending church.

After the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, the scale of institutional provision grew considerably. The union workhouse system that replaced locally administered poor relief became notorious for its conditions. Knitting was part of the labour expected of women and children inside. At the Gressinghall House of Industry in Norfolk, young women employed in knitting received two pennies from every shilling they earned, a sixth of their wages, with the institution keeping the rest. The work was not intended to generate significant revenue. The stated rationale was moral: knitting built habits of industry and virtue in people who had otherwise fallen into idleness.

An 1823 Liverpool Mercury article arguing against the use of the treadmill as prison punishment contains an image of what this looked like in practice. The writer describes visiting a private asylum and observing one of the inmates, a woman whose assigned employment was knitting stockings. She had been working on a single stocking for several months without ever finishing it. When the writer saw it, it was several yards long, and there was no prospect of it ending. ‘If the mind of the unfortunate lady be not changed,’ the article notes, ‘and if her keepers have not interfered, it may, by this time, be as many miles long.’

The article’s actual argument is about the treadmill: condemning a sane person to the same kind of endless, purposeless work is as cruel as what illness has done to this woman. The writer clearly finds both troubling, but I think the image is also revealing about the institutional thinking behind it: occupation without purpose or product, for people who could not be trusted with idleness. The endless stocking is that thinking carried on with nothing to interrupt it.

Not all knitting at the margins was institutional. Jane Cooper spent more than fifty years selling knitted stockings and gloves from a basket to the nobility and gentry travelling the Great North Road between London and Scotland. She was a fixture of the coaching route, well known as the Old Fat Stocking Woman, and many a duke and lord became her regular purchasers. When the railway was built and the coaching traffic stopped, her trade was finished. She died in May 1851, aged 86, at the union workhouse in Kirkby Stephen.

Her life and the lives of the institutional knitters were very different, but they ended in the same place. She could live from knitting while the economic conditions held, and not once they changed. What she had that the workhouse knitters did not was fifty years of choosing her own hours, setting her own pace, and selling to her own customers.

What knitting meant to the people inside those institutions is hard to recover. What the authorities thought it meant is well recorded: work, discipline, a small supplement to the accounts. The people sitting knitting in workhouse wards and charity schools left almost nothing behind. Most of the surviving evidence comes from the people running the institutions rather than those inside them.

My own experience of knitting as a last resort was nothing like theirs. I came to it at a point when my physical health had seriously declined, and I was adjusting to new challenges. Knitting turned out to be a way back into the sense that I could still learn something new, still make something, still find real pleasure in spending time with myself. No one assigned me the task, and I was not in an institution. But the possibility that some people in those workhouses and charity schools found something similar, even under coercion, some small space in a situation that offered very little, seems worth keeping open. Knitting can be a last resort, but at the same time, a new beginning.

Modern prison programmes that offer knitting to inmates are justified in therapeutic rather than productive terms. The argument now rests on mental health and wellbeing rather than virtue and character, but the underlying claim, that making things helps people in difficult situations, has been made for a long time.

Over its history, knitting has been a survival industry, a moral discipline, a form of wartime solidarity and a chosen leisure activity. For most of the period in which it was widespread, it was work: unglamorous, poorly paid, done out of necessity by people who had few alternatives. By the Victorian period it had simultaneously become a respectable drawing-room accomplishment and a form of compelled labour in institutions.

The people in the 16th-century censuses, the knitting schools, the workhouses, could never have imagined knitting as something done by choice, for pleasure, yet they are probably the people we have to thank for it.

Further reading

Lesley O’Connell Edwards, ‘Working Hand Knitters in England from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries’, Textile History, 41:1 (2010), pp. 70–85: A detailed account of knitting as paid labour, drawing on census records, charity school archives, and workhouse accounts.

Meg Gomersall, ‘Woman’s Work and Education in Lancashire, 1800–1870’, History of Education, 18:2 (1989), pp. 153–162: Broader context on women’s labour and education in the industrial period, and on the overlapping assumptions behind both.

Liverpool Mercury:
28 October 1859 — Kirkdale Industrial Ragged Schools
25 February 1858 — Asylum for Orphan Boys
6 June 1823 — the endless knitting / treadmill essay
20 May 1851 — obituary of Jane Cooper, the Old Fat Stocking Woman

Louise Tilbrook, ‘She didn’t knit for fun’, Everyday Knitter: An amusing personal rebuttal to the claim we should aspire to ‘Have the kind of summer your grandmother would recognise’.

WIP: Summer Diamond Sweater

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A fragment held in the Estonian Institute of History is one of the rare exceptions.

The fragment was excavated in 1949 from a Votic cemetery at Jõuga in North-Eastern Estonia. It is likely a part of a mitten cuff, since it was found at the hand of a woman in her grave. The burial has been dated to 1238–1299, making the mitten at least 700 years old and possibly closer to 800. It was kept in the collection for most of the twentieth century, mentioned in passing in a 1993 article about textiles from Votic cemeteries, but the knitting technique went unexamined until researcher Anneke Lyffland published a close study in 2005.

The Votics were a Finnic ethnic group who lived along the northern shores of Lake Peipus, west of modern-day St. Petersburg. Some of the mitten’s character can be reconstructed from the fragment: relatively fine gauge (25 sts × 30 rows per 4” / 10 cm), worked in stranded colourwork using red, blue, and natural white. The red was dyed with madder; the blue with indigo, which had to be imported at considerable cost and was blended with undyed fibre to stretch it further. In Estonian folk belief, red was associated with blood and had protective properties; it was thought that evil and disease could not cross a boundary of red. Taken together, these details make it very likely that the mitten was made for a wedding or a funeral. The knitting throughout is consistently even, with the floats well managed, which is clearly not the work of a beginner.

What Lyffland found, working carefully through the stitches to correct an earlier account that had mis-described the stitch pattern, was a single crossed stitch in the solid red row. Every other identifiable stitch in the fragment is uncrossed. In knitting, a crossed stitch is one where the legs of the loop sit twisted against each other, the result of entering a stitch from the wrong side. It can be done deliberately for texture, but here, in an otherwise uncrossed piece, it is likely a mistake. The knitter slipped up once, in what was probably a row worked by firelight or candlelight, and moved on; that mistake is the only reason anything is known about their technique.

The two main methods of hand knitting, what we call Eastern and Western, produce identical fabric when worked correctly. A piece of stockinette made by an Eastern knitter looks exactly like one made by a Western knitter. This means that for the vast majority of surviving historical knitting, including some of the most celebrated pieces that have come down to us, there is simply no way to determine how the knitter held their yarn or wrapped their needle.

The two methods differ in how the stitches are mounted on the needle before they are worked. Eastern knitters, looping the yarn from back to front around the needle, end up with stitches oriented differently from Western knitters. Both compensate automatically as they work, entering each stitch from the appropriate side and producing an uncrossed result. But when a stitch gets worked from the wrong side by mistake, the resulting cross slants in a direction determined by the method: right-slanting for an Eastern knitter, left-slanting for a Western one.

The crossed stitch in this fragment slants to the right. Lyffland also observed that Eastern knitting tends to untwist s-spun yarn, and this effect is visible in close-up photographs of the stitches, which supports this reading. The knitter was using the Eastern method, but we cannot know whether they held their yarn in the left or right hand. According to Anu Pink, the current authority on traditional Estonian knitting, knitters predominantly knitted “English” style up until influence from Finnish craft teachers led to a switch to continental knitting.

Most of the time, when we make a mistake in our knitting, the question is whether to fix it. It is easy to feel the work is somehow compromised, or that we failed ourselves (or the recipient) by not paying close enough attention. This knitter was clearly paying attention; the rest of the fragment is meticulous. The single wrong stitch probably went unnoticed by them, and everyone around them.

From the thousands of correct stitches, consistent and even throughout, almost nothing can be learnt about the hand that made them, and far more has been learnt, eight centuries later, from the one that went wrong. Perhaps the mistakes we make now could be just as valuable to someone else in the future.

Further reading

Anneke Lyffland, “A Study of a 13th-Century Votic Knit Fragment” (2005). The primary source for everything in this essay. Lyffland examined the fragment held at the Estonian Institute of History (AI 4008 XXII: 156).

Anu Pink “Knitting style – the grace of noble ladies or the speed of peasant girls?”, Studia Vernacula, vol. 11 (2019). The current authority on traditional Estonian knitting, covering regional styles, techniques, and the historical shift from English to Continental method.

FO: That 70s Toe

Isn’t it strange when swatching a technique turns into a project? When I was writing about Shortrow Toes last month, I started playing around with different methods of creating the wedge toe shape. If you draw a schematic, you will see that it is two trapezoids stacked on top of each other, forming a standard hourglass shape. I immediately saw it could be broken down into 6 equilateral triangles.

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The first time someone explained the symbolism of Aran stitches to me, I believed it without question. Cables for the fisherman’s rope, diamonds for the net mesh, each family’s pattern distinctive enough to identify a man lost at sea: it was a coherent, beautiful story, carrying the hush of something almost ancient, as if the salt and wind of Galway Bay still clung to every stitch. The wool, too, was left unwashed so that the natural lanolin would protect against the Atlantic weather. This tradition, in the telling, reaches back to ancient Celtic craftsmanship, encoded in the fabric for centuries before anyone thought to write it down.

It is a very good story, but as far as anyone has been able to establish, it is largely a twentieth-century invention. The symbolism attached to Aran stitches appears to have been constructed and promoted from the 1930s onward, beginning with a German textile historian named Heinz Edgar Kiewe, who encountered the sweaters in a Dublin shop in 1936. The tradition of family patterns, the ancient Celtic connections, the mythologised wool: none of it has much documentary support. Alice Starmore, who wrote the most rigorous study of Aran knitting in 1997, concluded that the sweaters in their modern form probably date from after 1946, and that they owe more to the Scottish gansey tradition than to anything uniquely Irish. She also found that the story was in circulation before the sweater in its modern form existed.

Aran is the most elaborate case but not an isolated one. Fair Isle has a story too: Spanish sailors from the Armada, shipwrecked on the island in 1588, taught the locals their distinctive colourwork technique. Outside influence has been seen in the design of the patterns (Moorish or Arabic connections have been proposed), and the story has been repeated often enough to feel like established history. The difficulty is that there is no evidence for it before the 1850s, two and a half centuries after the Armada, and the story is disputed even by people on the island itself. It is now more commonly thought that the tradition came from closer to the Baltic (Estonia, Lithuania, Finland), through trade rather than shipwreck. The Spanish Armada story is a better story: livelier, more dramatic, with a touch of swashbuckling bravado that neatly flatters the national imagination, but it is almost certainly a later addition.

Iceland is a more muted case. The lopapeysa (the yoked sweater that has come to feel synonymous with Icelandic identity) is often treated as much older than it is, as though it has always been there. The yarn it is typically made from, Lopi, now almost synonymous with Iceland in the minds of knitters, was developed only in the early twentieth century from earlier preparations of carded wool. The sweater style itself came together from a magazine pattern a couple of decades later. In this case, there is not as much false history surrounding it. Instead, it is a relatively recent tradition that has slowly been woven into a broader narrative of national continuity.

Even the gansey, a fundamentally practical and workmanlike sweater tradition, has accumulated its own embellishments. The pattern on a gansey, it is often said, was specific enough to identify a fisherman drowned and recovered from the sea. Of all the fishing-sweater myths this is probably the most persistent, and also the least supported: historians of the tradition have been looking for a documented case and have not found one. Some have traced it to J.M. Synge’s 1911 play Riders to the Sea, where a body washed up on a beach is identified by a distinctive mistake in his stocking; by the early 1960s that detail had migrated, in print, to the gansey and Aran sweater. Patterns were certainly distinctive in places, and in small fishing communities a familiar garment might sometimes have helped. But as the tradition spread, patterns were copied and shared across regions, and any identifying function they had would have blurred quickly.

Of the four, only the Aran story continues to circulate at full strength. The Armada story is actively disputed by Fair Isle people themselves; the lopapeysa was never quite false history in the same sense, but a recent tradition; the gansey myths are routinely debunked, yet never quite vanish. The Aran symbolism story was promoted by a commercial export industry from the start, and new audiences still come across it as if for the first time.

None of this is unusual in the history of folk objects. But why do sweaters, arguably more so than any other textile or even garment, so often come with such fanciful, even lurid, folklore?

Part of the answer is that a sweater looks as though it should mean something. The surface of a densely patterned Aran or Fair Isle garment is visibly structured, full of decisions: cables, colours, repeating motifs arranged with obvious care. A surface like that is easily read as a text, with a meaning waiting to be found. Plain grey jersey has very few origin myths, whereas a garment that looks as though it might be saying something makes people want to know precisely what it says.

Nation-building accounts for another part of it. In almost every case where the mythologising is most intense, there is a community that needs the object to carry more weight than the object can carry on its own. The Aran sweater’s mythology developed in the decades after a hard-won Irish independence, when the country was actively shaping its own national culture as one distinct from its coloniser across the water. The Fana sweater, worn in Norway under German occupation during the Second World War, became a silent symbol of resistance: a garment that could communicate what it was not safe to say out loud. The lopapeysa consolidated around Icelandic identity during the mid-twentieth century, following independence from Denmark. In each case, the sweater was taken up as a symbol at a time when a community was defining its identity.

Commercial motives mattered too, particularly in the Aran case. A sweater with an ancient story attached to it sells differently than one without. Kiewe was promoting his mythology at the same time as Irish cottage industries were trying to build export markets, and it is not difficult to see how a romantic story about ancient Celtic craftsmanship would serve that purpose. This is not straightforwardly cynical: many of the people who repeated the stories believed them, but the commercial convenience was still there. It is, when all is said and done, great marketing.

I think these myths are worth correcting, but I do not want to dismiss them either, because they are evidence of what we want from the objects we make. A sweater associated with a family, a tradition, a place or a history is a different thing to wear from one that is not. The desire for that connection is genuine, even when the story behind it is not, and the Aran sweater is no less remarkable because the symbolism of its stitches was largely invented in the twentieth century: the knitting is still extraordinary, and the craft is still real.

The stories grew up around these garments because the garments were so spectacular that they seemed to deserve them. Pick up a sweater you are proud of and it is easy to see why: the weight of it, the density of the stitches, the hours of work held in the wool. That was probably always enough on its own.

Further reading

Alice Starmore, Aran Knitting (1997). Examines the sweaters in the National Museum of Ireland directly and traces the tradition’s origins.

Alice Starmore, Book of Fair Isle Knitting (1989). Covers Fair Isle technique, pattern structure, and historical context.

Sheila McGregor, The Complete Book of Traditional Fair Isle Knitting (1981). A comprehensive survey of Fair Isle patterns and motifs, with material on where the designs actually come from.

Gail Ann Lambert, The Taxonomy of Sweater Structures and their Origins (MS thesis, 2002). An academic study classifying sweater construction types and tracing their documented origins across traditions.

Pierce Kehoe, The Knit of a Nation?: How Irishness was marketed to the world by the Aran sweater (1950-1980) (MS thesis, 2019). Examines how Aran sweater marketing constructed and reshaped ideas of Irishness for global consumers.

Gansey Nation, “Popular Gansey Myths” (ganseys.com). A myth-by-myth analysis of the gansey tradition written by a Wick historian and archivist.

FO: Shetland Hap

Usually when I’m travelling I cast on a sock: small, portable, mindless. But my partner had brought me back a wool-linen blend marketed as sock yarn, and as much as I love linen, it didn’t feel right turning it into socks. So instead I went looking for a shawl pattern to take with me.

Shetland lace has always fascinated (and intimidated) me, and I’d been waiting for an excuse to dip my toe in. Haps seemed like the sensible entry point: the central square or triangle is usually plain garter, with the lace saved for the border. Trouble is, most haps lean on the feather-and-fan motif in multiple colours, and I didn’t want to be haulingn multiple balls of wool around Britain. Then I found the Aestlight shawl: one colour, manageable complexity. Perfect.

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