Most of what a historical knitter knew disappears along with them. You can examine a surviving piece of fabric and determine the fibre, the gauge, the spinning direction of the yarn, sometimes the structure of a colour pattern. Technique, however (the way the knitter held their hands, how they tensioned the yarn, which direction they moved through the stitches), cannot be seen in the finished object. This is one reason the history of knitting technique is difficult to write, because the details of how people actually knitted are usually the first to be lost.
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.
I’ve heard of cultures that leave a small mistake in their work on purpose -have you ever heard of this? It would be interesting if that was the case and they found the fragment that had the mistake!
That’s fascinating. Funny to think it’s our mistakes that tell our stories. I like that.