Knitting History Forum Conference 2024

The 2024 Knitting History Forum conference took place on Saturday 3rd February 24

This year’s tour of knitting traditions and techniques features a range of archival and technical research into historical knitted artefacts and documents together with contemporary design and reconstruction for practical research investigations. Our speakers are based in the UK, Finland and Germany.

Read the conference report by Julia Holm:

Abstracts

A royal waistcoat re-examined

Beatrice Behlen

In 1924, a waistcoat knitted in fine blue silk said to have been worn by King Charles I on the scaffold in 1649 was donated to the Museum of London (inventory number A27050). This royal undergarment has been the subject of studies over the years, often with a focus on the stains on its front, and there have been attempts at drawing up a pattern and making a reproduction.

Over the last 18 months, the waistcoat has been the focus of an interdisciplinary project, aimed at broadening our knowledge of this iconic object. This was prompted by the garment’s exhibition in 2022-23, its planned display in the new London Museum in 2026, as well as recent developments in the scientific analysis of textiles. This time, the stains have not been in the spotlight, but rather the waistcoat’s provenance, the materials used, its construction and date of origin.

Using relatively recent online resources, claims for the complex provenance of the waistcoat have been checked. The garment has been systematically examined and described according to the Knitting in Early Modern Europe protocol for knitted items, and comparative garments (including very similar damask examples in Scotland and Oslo) have been considered. Small samples of the royal relic have undergone radiocarbon dating and methods of dye analysis have been combined to determine the source of the garment’s colour. Microfading testing, undertaken mainly to inform future display lighting, provided further information about dyes.

Collaboration with craftspeople enabled the testing of assumptions about how the garment was made. This included the evaluation of silk threads commercially available today to see how they relate to the original material used, and how they behave when undertaking a partial reconstruction.

In this talk, Beatrice Behlen will present some of the study’s findings, but also discuss the challenges, as well as the joys, of collaborating with colleagues from different fields and of working outside her comfort zone.

Past and present knitters on Fair Isle: a case study of Fair Isle knitted fishermen’s keps

Jennifer Daley

During 2022–2023, I lived on Fair Isle, the historic birthplace of Fair Isle knitting, and the most remote inhabited island in the United Kingdom. A total of 44 people live on Fair Isle, many of whom are knitters, including me. This paper will present insight into my life on Fair Isle and the knitters there, told through the lens of Fair Isle knitted fisherman’s keps. Long associated with Fair Isle, fisherman’s keps are caps or hats of conical shape and colourful design. Fisherman’s keps are an interesting way to weave the history of knitting with today’s modern knitters of Fair Isle.

Fair Isle is situated in the Shetland Islands, a Scottish archipelago between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. Fair Isle is a small island, approximately one and a half miles wide by three miles in length. Approximately 1,000 sheep including pure Shetland sheep and other breeds dominate the landscape and are an integral part of island life. Today, sheep on the island are primarily raised for meat, not wool, but remain an ever-present reminder of the connection between Fair Isle, the wool industry, and knitting.

Fisherman’s keps are associated with Fair Isle and the Shetland Islands, yet keps are also worn by people from other places. As fishing and sailing were nomadic pursuits, there was a constant sharing of textile cultures as fishermen and sailors visited different ports of call and interacted with others. Today’s knitters on Fair Isle continue the tradition of knitting fisherman’s keps and selling them to visitors. This paper will highlight key knitters on Fair Isle and their kep designs.

Fisherman’s keps provide an intriguing design concept, then and today. Once considered a necessity for survival at sea for fishermen and sailors, keps are now considered an entertaining and interesting way to display the knitter’s skill for design and colour. Keps offer an infinite number of knitting pattern and motif combinations, with local and international design influences. Yet, fisherman’s keps remain easily identifiable through the long conical shape and myriad mix of Fair Isle stranded colourwork.

Yarns for knitting: the influence of twist

Katrin Kania

Yarns form the basis of most textiles, making spinning the cornerstone technique for almost all other textile techniques. Historical spinning, though, is still not fully understood – nor is the influence of yarn on how textiles will behave.

This presentation looks at the differences between modern and medieval spinning. Based on images and ethnographical sources, the technique used for spinning with a hand-spindle in the European Middle Ages can be reconstructed. Hand-spindles, consisting of a spindle whorl and a spindle stick, are used together with a distaff to hold the fibres. With this technique, it is easy and efficient to spin highly twisted yarns, which conform well with the type of surviving yarns used in medieval fabrics.
These high-twist yarns behave differently from the typical modern yarns which have much lower twist. They are strong enough to be used unplied when weaving, saving a lot of work time. However, the twist will affect the finished fabric and its looks.

For knitting, yarn strength is not the main issue, as it would be for weaving – knitting can be done with relatively weak yarns too. But what happens if a strongly twisted yarn is used to knit? The high amount of twist will affect the fabric here as well, resulting in more or less distortion of the finished object. The solution to this is plying the yarns, and plied yarn is used in the majority of knitted objects.

When there are no words: using reconstruction as a tool for understanding the creation of knitted liturgical gloves

Lesley O’Connell Edwards

Reconstruction is becoming increasingly used as a tool by textile and clothing historians to understand extant garments. Historical knitted items have generally been overlooked by those studying textiles in depth, which is reflected in the lack of detail on these in most collections, including information on construction. This paper considers the usefulness of recreation of the knitted-in patterns on the medallions on backs of the hands and the cuffs of knitted liturgical gloves as a means of understanding their construction and production issues, and the skills their knitters needed, drawing on the examples in the Holy Hands database (www.kemeresearch.com).

Knitted liturgical gloves are high status items, solely used ceremonially by bishops and other senior churchmen in the western Christian church from the 12th century onwards. They were generally knitted to a fine gauge, using silk and metal threads, and often ornately embellished. These gloves are important items for the study of the history of knitting: especially those that date from the medieval and the early modern periods, as surviving high status knitted artefacts from those eras are very rare.

A few individual gloves have been briefly studied in the past, but the Holy Hands project, begun in 2020, is the first systematic survey of these gloves as knitted artefacts. Virtually nothing is known about those who knitted them; nor are there any contemporary records concerning their construction, hence the need to turn to reconstruction. The paper will discuss the rationale for identifying the selected aspects for recreation, and the parameters used, including the choice of yarn. It will reveal that the detailed examination involved in preparing for the recreations is as important as the actual recreation itself. Potential techniques for knitting the medallions will be discussed, as will the usefulness and practicalities of creating both knitted-in medallion and cuff patterns from a detailed examination of the original gloves. What the reconstruction process reveals about not only the skills of the knitters and the challenges they faced, and how their mindset might differ from that of a modern expert knitter will be considered, as will the possibility of identifying different workshops.

The facinating Korsnäs sweater

Marketta Luutonen

The most attractive Finnish design of sweater comes from Korsnäs municipality on the Ostrobothnian coast and is known by this name. The earliest Korsnäs sweaters were made for men just after the latter half of 19th century, and although the design has varied in popularity since that time, the tradition has never been broken completely.

Throughout their history, Korsnäs pullovers have primarily drawn attention for their visual qualities. Seldom are they noted for their warmth or other practical properties. The process by which meaning is assigned to them has been influenced not only by their physical qualities, but also by publicity gained through the people who wear them, through re-search, published material and handicrafts courses.

One characteristic of the Korsnäs sweater is that both knitting and crochet work are in-volved in it, producing its rich patterning and bright colours. In the early 20th century, there were women in the villages of Korsnäs who specialised in knitting these sweaters to order, either alone or together with two other women. Quite a number of these sweaters have been preserved in museums and private collections, and other information has also been forthcoming with regard to this tradition.

Korsnäs pullovers can be regarded as the decorative epitome of traditional Finnish knit-wear. Artisans have a particular appreciation for the fascinating and intricate technique by which they are made. The pullover is also an emblem of local heritage; it is a symbol of Korsnäs, of Finland’s Swedish-speaking community, and of ‘Finnishness’ in general.

Modern-day copies of traditional Korsnäs pullovers are iconic references to their original prototypes, which are now found only in museums. They indicate superior workmanship, an appreciation of traditional handicrafts, a particular style, and a warm article of clothing. The people who wear Korsnäs pullovers wish to emphasise their originality by wearing a unique item of clothing, and in doing so they also express what values they appreciate. Some Korsnäs pullovers are girls’ gifts for their fiancés. The human significance of these items is considerable and tells of the special relationship.

Expanding the biography of Miss Lambert

Sally Kentfield

This talk is about the research process that helped expand the limited biography of the successful Victorian knitting book author Miss Frances Lambert. The author’s biography was expanded using information found in physical and digital archives. The talk will discuss how corpus analysis techniques were applied to the prefaces of the books to find new research paths to investigate. Digital humanities techniques were used to manage the volume of source data that is now available from digitised book archives around the world. However, it was the traditional technique of systematically working through uncatalogued archives that unearthed margin notes that were key to unlocking the previously lost history of this accomplished and respected author. Richard Rutt had little information to work from when writing a biography of Miss Lambert for A history of hand knitting in 1987, resulting in barely half a page. Rutt was writing before the expansion of digital library and archive catalogues over the last 30 years. Projects such as the University of Southampton’s digitisation of their knitting reference library, and the general book digitisation projects of the British Library, Google, the Hathi Trust, and Project Gutenberg have increased the volume of source data that is now available from digitised archives around the world. It was unearthed margin notes that were key to unlocking the previously lost history of this accomplished and respected author. The findings of the research are significant because they expand the existing knowledge of the author. The margin notes that were discovered shed new light on the author’s life and work and provide valuable insight into the social and cultural context of the time. The talk will be useful to anyone who is interested in the history of knitting, Victorian literature, and the research process. It will provide a fascinating insight into the challenges and rewards of uncovering lost history.