Tag: khf2026

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

Emily Hilliard, Berea College Folklorist, Berea, Kentucky, Unites States will present The multi-stranded history of handknitting in Appalachia

Sources on traditional Appalachian folklife often cite handknitting as a practice commonly done at home from the arrival of the early settlers. But specific details on what the knitting tradition looked like in the mountain south of the US are scant and overshadowed by the region’s well-documented weaving history.

Knitting was likely brought to Appalachia by Ulster Scots who emigrated from Northern Ireland in the mid to late 1700s. In early 18th century Ulster, women commonly knitted and sold wool stockings to supplement their household income and they continued this practice in their new country. The more traceable regional history of small-scale sheep and wool production offers more evidence. According to historian Thomas Clark, the first settlers to Kentucky brought sheep with them. The Merino breed was introduced to the state in 1809, with English breeds such as Leicester, Southdown, and Cotswold arriving by 1820. Scholar Donald Davis reports that by 1830, sheep husbandry was practiced on a large scale in the mountain south. Scots Irish subsistence farmers primarily used their flocks to produce wool for handknitted and woven blankets and garments used in the home.

Over time, Scots Irish settlers’ knitting practices influenced and were influenced by handknitting traditions of other immigrants to the region, including Germans, Highland Scots, Welsh, and Irish. By the early 1800s, the Cherokee had adopted sheep farming and wool production, regularly exhibiting spinning and knitting at their national fairs. Susan Strawn notes that enslaved people in the American South, including Appalachia, knitted for their own families and were forced to knit for their enslavers.

Folklorist Emily Hilliard has researched the cultural history of handknitting in Appalachia through archives and artefacts in the US and Ireland. She has undertaken fieldwork with contemporary knitting practitioners, wool producers, and sheep farmers. Her paper addresses questions about techniques, patterns, styles, products, culture, and the economics of handknitting in Appalachia from the 18th to early 20th centuries. How has cross-cultural exchange shaped this tradition over time? What is the relevance of cultural dialogue, women’s lives and work, and home-based agrarian economies to the history of knitting in Appalachia?

Biography for Emily Hilliard

Emily Hilliard is the Folklorist at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky and the former West Virginia State Folklorist and Founding Director of the West Virginia Folklife Program. Her book, Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia (UNC Press, 2022) was named a finalist for the 2022 Weatherford Award in nonfiction for books “best illuminating the challenges, personalities, and unique qualities of the Appalachian South.” She is the recipient of a 2025 Center for Craft Research Fund Grant for the project, “The Multi-Stranded History of Hand Knitting in Appalachia.”

Image credit: The dropped stitch (circa 1897) by John H Tarbell, Asheville, NC (image: Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division Washington DC, USA)

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.

Nora Howley, knitting researcher and educator, founder of Knitting Tales, will present From Shetland sheep to USA knitters: exploring the history of Shetland wool in handknitting in the United States 1848 to 1990

Since the first white people began the colonisation of the United States, wool from the British Isles was imported there. It is impossible to say what proportion may have come from Shetland at any given time. However, from the late 19th century, when a yarn industry selling to handknitters emerged, reference to Shetland wool and styles of knitting are found. Many of these are in yarn company’s branded patterns calling for specific products to be used for specific garments or accessories. By the early 20th century, multiple commercial yarn companies in the USA were selling Shetland labelled wool with patterns to go with it to handknitters. This paper will show how the name “Shetland” was used to signify the particular qualities of both yarn and styles of knitting.

It uses images and text from pattern books, women’s magazines, and industry publications, to demonstrate how “Shetlandness” has been represented for more than 100 years in an ever-changing industry before the emergence of the internet.

Biography for Nora Howley

Nora Howley is a knitter, researcher, educator, and storyteller whose career in education has spanned learners from toddlers to adults in their eighties. She completed her EdD at the University of Glasgow in 2019, a milestone that reignited her enthusiasm for research and discovery. She founded Knitting Tales as a platform to share her findings and insights.

Howley also curates and manages a collection of patterns by designer Ron Schweitzer—materials that never made the transition to digital formats and would otherwise be inaccessible to contemporary knitters. Her work is driven by a deep interest in the relationships between patterns, yarns, people, and places. She continues to teach knitting as a way to share her love of the craft and to encourage others to uncover and tell their own stories.

Image credit: Cover of Bernat Handicrafter’s Fashion in Real Shetland, Book 178 (1957), Emile Bernat & Sons Company, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, USA (image: Nora Howley)

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

The Fair Isle knitting collection at National Museums Scotland: history, craft and identity

Helen Wyld, Senior Curator of Historic Textiles, National Museums Scotland

Fair Isle knitting, with its brightly coloured geometric patterns, is one of Scotland’s most recognisable exports. A constant presence in global fashion since the 1920s, it is still produced by hand knitters in Shetland today. But despite its omnipresence, the origins of Fair Isle are not well understood. This is a result of the poor survival of early examples, a lack of documentary evidence, and a focus on the role of Fair Isle in 20th century fashion in the literature.

The collection at National Museums Scotland, which has never been the subject of serious study, has the potential to change the interpretation of the early history of the craft. Three groups of objects, which are dated to the 1850s, 1870s and 1880s, thanks to their documented museum history, provide a concrete starting point for dating and assessing early Fair Isle knitting.

These objects also provide a unique insight into the ways that Fair Isle was described, marketed and consumed in its early decades. Drawing on internal museum documentation, donor records, the catalogues and reviews of international exhibitions, publications by Shetland residents, and contemporary trade material, Helen Wyld will explore the mythology that surrounded Fair Isle knitting from its first ‘public’ appearance, at the 1851 Great Exhibition. She will show that the qualities of authenticity, hand craft and local specificity that are today embedded in the Fair Isle brand have their origins in the mid-19th century, and were both a reaction against, and a product of, the rapid industrialisation of the period.

Biography for Helen Wyld

Helen Wyld is Senior Curator of Historic Textiles at National Museums Scotland, where she is responsible for European and Scottish textiles from the medieval period to 1850. Helen is a specialist in the history of European tapestry, and her book The Art of Tapestry was published in 2022. Her research interests range from medieval woven silks to Paisley shawls and Scottish knitting

Image credit: Knitted stockings (A.248.8), Fair Isle, 1850-1857 (image: © National Museums Scotland)

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.

Carol Christiansen, Curator of Collections, Shetland Museum and Archives, will present Shetland Fine Lace Knitting: an overview of history and design

In the late 1830s, a form of extremely fine openwork knitting in wool emerged in a small community in the Shetland islands. Shetland Fine Knitted Lace would become part of the large international trade in fashion accessories and garments throughout the Victorian and Edwardian periods. At the same time, it challenged authors of early knitting pattern books and inspired the development of machine-knitted lace shawl manufacture in the British midlands. Carol Christiansen will explore the seemingly improbable origins and trade mechanisms of Shetland fine knitted lace, and the materials and skills required for its development. In particular, the preparation and spinning of very fine wool from the Shetland sheep breed was crucial to the success of knitting design and execution. The paper will set out the important role of the hand spinner as separate from the designer-knitter.

Surviving collections of Shetland knitted lace show a continuum of design principles, providing a way to define the craft. Primarily, motif placement and design complexity was dictated by Victorian fashion: how the garment would be worn against fashions of the day, showing off the most complex design areas of the garment as it was draped on the body. These will be illustrated with 19th century garments from Shetland Museum’s collection.

In the second half of the 19th century, the East Midlands began to develop machines which could produce fine shawls in openwork knitting. For a time, these garments were marketed as Nottingham-Shetland lace, in an attempt to mimic and undercut the hand knitting cottage industry in Shetland. This resulted in differences in design and manufacture.

Some lace knitters experimented with new styles, possibly as a result of commissions, keeping abreast of fashion from the 1850s into the first half of the 20th century. The change from designing and making two-dimensional garments to blouses beginning in the 1920s will be explored in light of a reliance on traditional Shetland knitting techniques to create three-dimensional lace garments in the round. The Victorian specialised craft continues to inspire people into the 21st century, from local makers to haute couture designers.

Biography for Carol Christiansen

Carol Christiansen has been Curator of Collections at Shetland Museum and Archives since 2006.  She received her doctorate in Archaeology with a specialism in textiles from the University of Manchester in 2003. Her research on Shetlandic, Scottish, and Nordic archaeological and historical textiles has been published widely. She is the author of Taatit Rugs: the Pile Bedcovers of Shetland (2015) and Shetland Fine Lace Knitting: recreating patterns from the past (2024).

Image credit: Detail of a shawl (TEX 2004.303) given as a wedding present, Lerwick, 1921, Shetland Museum

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.

Susan Webster, collector and researcher of knitting tools, will present The development of circular knitting needles during the 20th century

The circular knitting needle is now an established tool among handknitters. But commercial production of circular needles is only about 100 years old. Before that, it was double points all the time. Susan Webster discusses the origin of early circulars in the UK and US, what they were made of, and how they were merchandised.

The earliest patents in the UK date to 1893 and 1906 and in the US to 1918. However, these registrations did not result in their immediate appearance in wool shops and haberdashery departments. Early UK packaging for Flexiknit and Abel Morrall’s Twin Pin gives patent dates of 1921 and 1922. Early circulars were all metal cables attached to short metal pins. Marketing messages accompanied these new, boxed products and claimed that circulars were modern, easier to use, less dangerous, and reduced the risk of losing a needle. US packaging – manila envelopes and cardboard backing sheets – was cheaper to produce. Americans used their own distinctive marketing, including differentiation of needle shape and materials, claims of design superiority, use of house-branding, and buying groups.

In the 1930s, American firms were offering rigid plastic circulars in parallel with metal circulars. The early materials such as celluloid and casein were easier to manipulate but the rigid plastics were hard to store and some were highly flammable. By the late 1930s, nylon and other flexible plastics had been developed, although all such innovations were soon sucked into war production. World War II had many effects on hand knitting tools such as no nickel-plating to prevent rust, no British sizing in the US for double points or circulars, and shortages of materials which forced reliance on “make-do and mend”. Soon after the war, flexible nylon circulars with metal pins and entirely nylon single piece circulars appeared. There were similar to the earlier rigid plastics but much more flexible. Few advances have been made in the basic tool since this era.

Biography for Susan Webster

Susan Webster is a collector of and researcher in knitting needles and tools, with a special interest in the period when commercialisation and branding of needles were being developed.

Susan grew up in the United States, but has lived her adult life in Australia.  Retired since 2003, she has built up a research database of over 1000 knitting needle brand names and manufacturers, with about 900 physical specimens.  She shares her information on her website www.knitting-needle-notions.com.au.  Many of her articles and presentations are also available on this site.

Susan has published several research articles in the TCI Bulletin and in 2024-2025 completed a three-part series on the history of circular knitting needles.  She has spoken and published in Britain and Australia too.  She is a past president of the Needlework Tool Collectors Society of Australia.

She is still a keen collector.  “The more you collect, the more you want to know,” she said. 

Image credit: Promotional leaflet for Flexiknit (1920s), showing the old-fashioned knitter with her dangerous, slippery double pointed needles and the ‘modern girl’ with her circular needle