The next annual Knitting History Forum conference is on Saturday 7 February 2026, with presentations on the history of knitting. The conference is hosted online and tickets are available to purchase. Please note – If you cannot attend on the day but would like to watch recordings of the presentations, please buy a ticket for the event in advance. It will not be possible to access the recordings without a valid ticket for the conference and they will not be available to buy after the event has taken place.
Knitting the pieces together: fragments of knitted stockings from the Swedish warship Vasa 1628
Josefin Lindegren, dress and art historian, Skansen Museum, Stockholm, Sweden
The research project Clothing and shoes from the Swedish warship Vasa aimed to document and analyse the better preserved parts of the museum’s textile collection from 2020 to 2023. It is a unique collection with well over 5,600 fragile textile fragments from clothes and shoes found onboard. Several textile techniques are represented but there are few knitted fragments and even fewer for which the objects are identifiable with certainty. One knitted find merits particular attention: it is fragile, brownish orange and hardened due to mineralisation and corrosion. The find consists of around 50 small knitted fragments. These were found, together with woven fragments, inside a pair of shoes just outside the ship’s stern. The shoes, made of high-quality goat skin in the latest fashion, also contained foot bones from a young male individual.
A detailed documentation and analysis to record observations and measurements of the fabric and yarn was undertaken. Only the foot of the stocking has been preserved. This makes it hard to know anything about the leg section. In spite of the fragments’ poor condition, vital information could be retrieved from the foot such as technique, gauge, the loop height and width, knitting direction and toe shaping in the form of decreases. Several woven textile fragments were found on top of the knitted fabric with imprints from whipstitches along the edges. This indicates that the knitted stockings were mended with woven textile patches. Test swatches were knitted using yarn and gauge equivalent to the fragments’ as part of a reconstruction project at the Vasa Museum. Two pairs of stockings were reconstructed using a pattern based on archaeological finds from Tudor London and Norwich published in The Typical Tudor: reconstructing everyday 16th century dress.
Biography for Josefin Lindegren
Josefin Lindegren is a dress and art historian from Stockholm with a background that includes working with museum collections, from archaeological textiles to modern theatre costumes. The range of work has provided different ways of analyzing dress and textiles. Currently working at the open-air museum Skansen in Stockholm, focusing on documentation and digitalization of Skansen’s historical costume collection.
Image credit: Fragments of the knitted stocking found inside a pair of shoes, Fnr 23070 (image: Vasamuseet, CC BY)