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. Everywhere this kind of knitting took hold, some version of the sheath came along with it.

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 did the same job with nothing but a feather and thread. 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. But the sheath’s true job had nothing to do with romance. 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 kind somebody’s family kept in a drawer for generations before giving it to a museum. A plain sheath with no heart, no initials, no love story attached to it did the real work: propped at a hip for ten or twelve hours a day, worn down, split, or simply lost.

By the early twentieth century, this kind of income knitting 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.” A tool built for economic survival was retired for looking poor.

It has started to make a come back, in pockets. Gansey knitters chasing the tight, even gauge those sweaters need have started picking the sheath back up, or its Norfolk cousin, the “shield,” because a needle held steady at the hip takes over a job that unsupported hands otherwise do alone, and that eases strain for a lot of 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 that common for that long doesn’t just 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’ll 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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This is not quite the story most of us have heard about the craft.

The growth of hand knitting in England is closely tied to shifts in both fashion and 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 the market that opened up was filled 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 reveal something else: knitting was not yet universal knowledge, but rather a taught skill, often formally so. 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 curriculum in those mill schools expressed the same priorities. 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 institutional scale shifted 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 reaches for an image that captures what this looks 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 finds both troubling. But the image also says something about the institutional logic the article is borrowing from. Occupation without purpose or product, directed at people who cannot be trusted with idleness, is the frame behind all of it. The endless stocking is just what that looks like when nothing interrupts 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 railway travel arrived, and the coaching traffic ceased, 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 are different stories, but they arrive at the same place. Knitting sustained her as long as the economic conditions for it held, and could not sustain her when 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. The historical record tells us what the authorities thought it meant: work, discipline, a small supplement to the accounts. The people sitting knitting in workhouse wards and charity schools left almost nothing behind. The evidence skews toward 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 has shifted from virtue and character to mental health and wellbeing. But the underlying claim, that this kind of making helps people in difficult situations, has been with us for a long time.

The journey knitting has taken, from survival industry to moral discipline to wartime solidarity to chosen leisure, is a long one. 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 the ones that we should probably be thanking for that.

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 sat 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. The fragment gives some sense of what this mitten was: 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. All of this points to the mitten almost certainly being made for a wedding or a funeral, and the knitting throughout is consistently even, with the floats well managed. This was 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 reason we know anything at all 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 difference between the methods lies in how stitches sit 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 corroborates the conclusion. The knitter was using the Eastern method, but we can’t 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.

The correct stitches, thousands of them, consistent and even throughout, ironically tell us very little about the hand that made them. The one that went wrong, eight centuries later, tells us quite a lot. 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. It is also, as far as anyone has been able to establish, 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. The story, she found, arrived before the sweater did.

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. The design of the patterns does suggest outside influence (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. Current thinking places the tradition’s origins closer to the Baltic (Estonia, Lithuania, Finland), arriving 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. It is also, almost certainly, a later addition.

Iceland offers a more muted version of the same story. The lopapeysa (the yoked sweater that has come to feel synonymous with Icelandic identity) carries the weight of something 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 isn’t 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, sustained by a commercial export industry from the start, was designed to travel, and it keeps arriving fresh to new audiences.

None of this is unusual in the history of folk objects. But why is it that sweaters - arguably more so than any other textile or even garment - so often come adorned with such rich, 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. That kind of surface invites interpretation. It looks like a text, and a text implies a meaning waiting to be read. Plain grey jersey does not tend to generate origin myths. A garment that looks like it might be saying something creates a demand to know precisely what it is saying.

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. Again and again, the sweater gets conscripted at the moment when a community is deciding who it is.

Commercial motivation has played a role too, particularly in the Aran case. A sweater with an ancient story attached to it sells differently than one without. Kiewe’s mythology arrived at the same moment that 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.

While I think it is important to correct these myths, I don’t think we should dismiss them. Instead, we should ask what they reveal about what we want from the objects we make. A sweater that carries the weight of a family, a tradition, a place, a history is a different thing to wear than one that does not. The desire for that connection is genuine, even when the story that supplies it is not. The Aran sweater is not less remarkable because the symbolism of its stitches was largely invented in the twentieth century. The knitting is still extraordinary. 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’re 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 from 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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Usually when we learn to knit, the knit stitch comes first, and for many people it feels natural relatively quickly. Then comes the purl: the same motion in reverse, the yarn in front, the needle inserted from right to left. It is often described as the more awkward of the two, and the Continental purl in particular has a reputation for feeling strained at first. There are ways around it: Norwegian purling keeps the yarn at the back and avoids the motion most people find fiddly; combination knitting wraps the yarn clockwise on the purl rather than the usual anti-clockwise, which some knitters find more comfortable. It’s worth trying all of them, and worth trying more than once. I came to love Continental purling, specifically combined Continental, and now feel that my purl rows are often more enjoyable than the knit rows.

But the premise behind all of this, that mastering the purl stitch is necessary to advance as a knitter, is worth examining.

Knitting and purling are two ways of making the same basic stitch. The technique differs - the position of the yarn, the direction the needle enters the loop - but the stitch in the fabric is structurally the same either way. From the right side, a stitch made by knitting shows as a smooth V, which we call a knit stitch; one made by purling shows as a bump, a purl stitch. When you work flat in alternating rows of knit and purl, you get stockinette: smooth on one side, bumpy on the other. When you work only knit stitches flat, you get garter stitch, bumps on both sides, a thicker and more elastic fabric. To many, garter stitch is associated with beginners.

Shetland lace, which is widely regarded as among the finest hand knitting ever produced, is worked entirely in garter stitch. There is not a single purl stitch in a traditional Shetland lace shawl. This does not make it beginner’s work. The patterns are complex and delicate, the finished objects are remarkably fine, and they are built entirely from the knit stitch, worked flat, with decreases and eyelets forming the complex patterns.

Conversely, Fair Isle garments are typically worked in the round, which means stockinette is produced using only the knit stitch: every round goes in the same direction, so the purl side never faces you. These are some of the most iconic knitted garments in the world, and at their most elaborate they involve many subtle colour changes within a single motif. For sleeve types which would usually necessitate working flat above the armholes, such as drop shoulder and set-in sleeves, steeks are added instead. These are extra columns of bridging stitches worked into the fabric at the point where an opening will eventually be cut. The knitter continues in the round for the entire garment without ever purling back; the steeks are cut through at the end to open the fabric. There are even examples of Fair Isle garments knitted flat with the right side always facing the knitter, requiring the yarn to be cut and rejoined on every row.

Working in the round is a very old method of knitting. Surviving early examples of knitted objects, fragments from Egypt, Spain, and the Middle East from the medieval period, tend to be worked circularly. The assumption that flat knitting is the default and circular knitting is a specialist technique has things a bit backwards. Producing stockinette by working flat, knit one row, purl one row, appears to have become more common around the turn of the last century, as fashions changed and the sweater became an item of everyday clothing. The expectation that knitters work flat pieces and seam them together, in the long view of the craft, is a relatively recent one.

The purl stitch itself does appear in some of the earliest knitted fragments found in Egypt, but that knowledge did not carry into European knitting. Richard Rutt, in A History of Hand Knitting, concluded that the purl was a late invention in the European tradition, and the earliest datable European purl stitches are on the stockings that Eleonora de Toledo, wife of Cosimo de Medici, was buried in around 1562. Before that, it seems that European knitting was worked without it.

There is a further complication: Portuguese-style knitting, found not just in Portugal but also in Turkey and parts of South America, treats the purl as its primary stitch. The yarn is tensioned around the neck or on a pin at the chest, with the purl side facing the knitter, making the knit stitch the awkward one. It’s even possible that this style could be the oldest form of knitting, which adds another layer to the question of which stitch is foundational and which came later.

None of this means purling is unnecessary. Ribbing requires alternating knit and purl stitches within the same row, and ribbing is hard to replace. On my knitting machine, which produces only stockinette, the workaround is to ladder down a column of stitches and latch them back up from the other side, turning them from knit to purl one by one. It works, but it is not fast. Textured fabrics, cables, seed stitch, most of the stitches that define the gansey tradition, are built from combinations of the two, and ganseys are some of the most technically complex and historically significant garments in knitting. Even those are often worked in the round with plain stockinette making up the body, so the purling is concentrated in the sections around the chest.

I am not arguing that knitters should avoid the purl stitch or stop working at becoming more comfortable with it. Getting comfortable with purling allows you access to the whole world of knitting, and I’ve come to love it. The point is that a preference for purl-avoidance tends to get treated as beginner behaviour, something to grow out of, when the preference is neither new nor limiting. Some of the most admired knitting in the world was built around this aversion. The current popularity of stockinette sweaters worked in the round is not a modern shortcut; it is a very old preference, and I don’t think it’s going away.

Further reading

A History of Hand Knitting, Richard Rutt: the standard academic reference on the subject, and the source for much of what we know about when the purl stitch arrived in Europe.

The History of Hand Knitting, V&A: a broad overview of the craft’s development, from the earliest surviving examples through to the present day, with pieces from the V&A collection.

British Knitting Traditions, V&A: on the regional traditions of the British Isles, including Fair Isle, Shetland lace, and the gansey.

History of Hand Knitting, KC Guild: a readable overview with good detail on the purl stitch’s timeline and earliest documented examples.

One option is to simply pick up the stitches from the cast-on edge and start knitting, but this leaves a noticeable ridge on the inside of the work. A provisional cast on gets around this by leaving the cast-on stitches live and ready to work in the opposite direction. Depending on the method, those held stitches are kept in place either by waste yarn (which is removed later) or by a spare needle. The most common waste-yarn approach in hand knitting is the crochet chain; the most popular spare-needle method is Judy’s Magic Cast On (JMCO).

I have used both extensively and I am a big fan of JMCO. I have also used a long-tail cast on as provisionally, with waste yarn as the thumb yarn, and main yarn as the index finger yarn. After knitting, you can pick out the waste yarn, though it does not unravel as cleanly as the crochet chain does.

When I took up machine knitting a few months ago, I found that the standard approach to starting most projects there is to cast on with waste yarn, knit a few rows, and then join the main yarn. Waste yarn is king in machine knitting: the only extra step is a short stretch of knitting before the main yarn begins. The result is a provisional cast-on: the first row of main yarn stitches stays open and can be picked up later to work in the opposite direction, make a hem, or bind off. The waste yarn then comes out with a single snip and a pull. The stitch structure is the same in hand knitting, so I decided there was no reason not to try it.

What I like about this is that it requires nothing you do not already have: no crochet hook, no spare needle, no new technique to learn. The cost is a few rows of waste yarn at the start, which is not much for most projects. I did once use this on a 250-stitch cast on and found myself wondering whether the crochet chain might have been faster, but for anything small it is not a consideration.

Note, I have only tested this working flat, not in the round, although I can’t see a reason this would cause a problem.

Tools needed: project needles, waste yarn, main yarn, scissors or snips, a smaller needle for picking up stitches (optional).

Step 1. Cast on the required number of stitches in waste yarn, using any regular method (long-tail, knitted cast on, backwards loop, cable cast on, etc.).

Step 2. Knit at least one row in waste yarn. Two or three rows is better.

Step 3. Knit one more row in waste yarn, keeping your tension looser than usual. This will make it easier to pick up the stitches later.

Step 4. Join the main yarn and knit one row in plain stockinette. This is a set-up row; the following row will be the first row of your pattern.

Step 5. Work your pattern as instructed, until it is time to pick up the stitches from the provisional cast on.

Step 6. With the wrong side facing, pick up the first set of loops in your working yarn. A smaller needle makes this easier, though it is not mandatory.

Step 7. Carefully snip a stitch in the waste yarn on the side opposite to where the tail sits (the final row of waste yarn knitted).

Step 8. Pull on the tail of the waste yarn from that last row. It should come away easily, and the waste yarn will simply fall free.

Step 9. You can now work your pattern in main yarn as instructed.

This simpler provisional cast-on works well when your stitch count is small, since knitting a few rows of waste yarn is not much of an imposition, or when you do not have a crochet hook or spare needle to hand. I have used it when making short row toes, a technique that machine knitting prompted me to revisit in hand knitting. If you would like to find out more about short-row toes, you can read about them here:

I had been keeping an eye on Chase Harpole’s Earthbound for a couple of months and had set my mind on casting on this spring. It is a seamlessly constructed, top-down sweater in sport weight yarn, with wide, even stripes reminiscent of a classic rugby shirt. What drew me to it beyond the look was the sizing: forty adult sizes grouped by shoulder width rather than chest measurement. Shoulder width is, in my experience, the dimension that matters most for a good sweater fit, and seeing it taken seriously from the start was immediately appealing.

I had also been dreaming about a wool I’d seen at my local yarn store. Semilla Melange from BC Garn is a woolen-spun sport weight yarn that comes in a refined selection of muted colours. There were two colourways I couldn’t stop thinking about: a deep chocolate and a dark navy, both shot through with small flecks of orange and red. Fazer, Finland’s most popular chocolate brand, uses a similar navy in its packaging, and I’d always thought the chocolate looked particularly chic when peeking out of the packaging. The pattern and yarn seemed to belong together, and everything was on track for it to be on my needles as the snow was melting.

Then, in mid-March, I ended up getting a knitting machine. I previously wrote about how this was something I never thought I’d get into, but it somehow just happened. After a few simple hats, pairs of socks, and a slightly more advanced lace scarf, I decided it was time to tackle a sweater on the machine. My plan was to ease myself in with something simple: a drop shoulder sweater, worked in pieces, bottom up. No unusual construction, no conversion work, just learning the machine’s habits before adding complexity. This is a reasonable approach for a beginner, so of course I abandoned it almost immediately, and decided I would make Earthbound on the machine and work out the adaptations as I went.

The problem was that it is a seamless, top-down design with set-in sleeves, intended for hand knitting. Working in the round isn’t possible on a single-bed machine, and seamless top-down construction isn’t something I had seen instructions for in machine knitting. Still, I decided it was better to make a sweater I truly wanted than something just for the sake of it. So, away I went, overly confident and perhaps a bit naive.

After six swatches (yes, you read that correctly) I still couldn’t match the pattern’s gauge on my machine. I settled on the fabric I liked best and decided to recalculate the instructions from the schematic rather than keep chasing the original gauge. This also gave me the opportunity to customise the dimensions to my own body rather than choosing the nearest graded size. I took careful measurements and worked through the arithmetic, checking each section against the schematic. The previous time I had trusted a size chart over my own measurements, I ended up with sleeves 10 cm too long. Although I had more confidence in the designer this time, I realised that nobody’s body neatly fits into any one box, and in my case the arms appear to be the significant outlier.

Rewriting the pattern into my spreadsheet (running totals, row-by-row increases, calculated widths and lengths at each stage) was where I encountered something unexpected. The back yoke depth was considerably shorter than the front. I had never seen this in a hand-knitting pattern before and spent some time working out what it meant.

The construction goes by several names, among them European shoulders, English tailoring, and fully fashioned shoulders. The terminology is not consistent, and the sources I found do not agree on what distinguishes one term from another. “European Shoulder Seam” appears to be a relatively recent coinage used as an umbrella for what is variously called English, Italian, or French seams, all of which describe the same basic principle: placing the shoulder seam on the back of the shoulder rather than on top. The front piece carries no shoulder shaping at all and just runs straight across. When the garment is assembled it torques naturally into position over the shoulder. This seems like it shouldn’t work, but the more I thought about it, the more it started to make sense.

This method has its origins in commercial knitwear, with the motivation being efficiency. Concentrating all the shoulder shaping on one piece meant that the other piece could be knitted without any shaping at all, making it extremely efficient. The resulting shoulder seam ends up sitting on the scapular spine, which is said to be where it should be for an anatomical fit. Designers had taken that industrial tradition and brought it into a hand-knitting pattern, and I was then taking it back to a machine. If anyone has a clear source on the distinctions between the different terms for this construction, it would be great to know.

I sat down at the machine the morning after finishing the spreadsheet, planning to get most of the sweater done over the weekend. The top of the back yoke begins with short rows, which on a machine require the fabric to be weighted evenly below the needle bed. Directly after a cast on there is very little fabric to hang weights from. After a couple of false starts I found a solution: cast on with waste yarn first, knit a couple of inches, then work a crochet cast on onto that base. The waste yarn gives enough fabric to attach weights, and once the short rows are done the knitting proceeds cleanly.

The pattern also includes a contrast-colour detail on each sleeve cap, worked in short rows using a small section of intarsia. I had bought a second-hand intarsia carriage for exactly this kind of work, but it was still in the UK. Working the intarsia section by hand while also managing short rows felt like too many variables to track at once, so I left the detail out. It had been one of the things I loved most about the pattern, and dropping it was a bit of a disappointment. The sleeves look fine without it, and I’m glad I made the decision to simplify things slightly.

After those early obstacles, the knitting itself moved quickly. Each sleeve took about an hour on the machine, which makes the case for second-sleeve syndrome quite weak. Seaming and the collar followed without drama. The overall ease was, I think, a product of how the pattern was written: the instructions are clear enough that converting them, while involved, was mostly a matter of working carefully through what was already there. A well-written pattern is one you can adapt.

I have decided it is the best sweater I have ever made. The fit is better than anything previous, partly because I calculated the dimensions to my own body rather than selecting from a chart. The stripes are exactly what I hoped. The Semilla Melange is soft enough to wear against the skin, something I wasn’t certain of until the fabric was blocked and fully relaxed.

The week after finishing it, I wore it on a day out at Seaton Sluice with family. There is something different about wearing a new sweater through a full afternoon outdoors with people who know you well, compared to putting it on for a day home alone. That afternoon is when it started to feel finished.

The European shoulder construction is something I want to try again moving forward. I hadn’t come across it before this project, and now that I understand what it does, I can see myself applying it in future work regardless of whether the original pattern calls for it. The fit across the shoulders is the part I am most pleased with.

I plan to make the next machine-knit sweater in flat pieces, closer to how the machine is typically used. I may come back to Earthbound in hand knitting at some point. For now, the result was better than I had any right to expect from a project I entered by ignoring all of my own advice.

FURTHER READING

Pattern: Earthbound by Chase Harpole

Yarn: Semilla Melange by BC Garn

On European shoulders and fully fashioned construction:

- “Zen Inspirations: The European Shoulder Seam” — East London Knit (2016). Good introduction to the construction and how it came to be named.

- “Full Fashioned Shoulders” by Leslie Gonzalez — TKGA. This covers the history, the mathematics of shoulder slope, and why the seam sits where it does.

Before the Industrial Revolution, almost every household spun. Not as a hobby, and not occasionally: spinning was a constant background activity, fitted around everything else. Women and children picked up a spindle at any spare moment throughout the day, and this yarn would go on to weavers who would produce cloth. Even with the spinning wheel, which had greatly increased productivity over the spindle, it is estimated that eight spinners were still needed to supply the yarn for a single weaver’s loom.

The flying shuttle, invented in 1733, made the bottleneck in spinning worse. By allowing one weaver to do the work of two, it meant looms could run faster and demand more yarn than before. Thirty years later, the spinning jenny arrived, and with it, the ability to spin multiple threads at once. Production began moving out of homes and into mills, amplified by water power and then steam. This is how the familiar shape of industrialisation emerged: factories, mechanised production, large-scale labour systems, and supply chains that reached across the world. Those supply chains were already global before the end of the eighteenth century. The rapid expansion of British textile production depended on cotton, much of it grown by enslaved people in the Americas. Mills processed that cotton into cloth, which was then exported around the world.

Within a generation or two, the domestic spinning that had occupied women and children for centuries had for the most part disappeared. The knowledge stopped being passed down, and weaving followed much the same path. Hand spinning and weaving exist today, but as specialist crafts, not as things most people do or learn as a matter of course. Knitting did not follow that trajectory.

* * *

Part of the explanation is structural. In 1589, William Lee invented the stocking frame, a machine that reproduced the motions of hand knitting using rows of hooked needles. It could produce stockings quickly and consistently, and it eventually spread across parts of England. But instead of giving rise to factories, it gave rise to the framework knitting industry: machines operated in homes and small workshops, with workers producing goods for merchants, often using frames that they rented rather than owned. Mechanisation arrived, but the broader reorganisation of labour that defines industrialisation did not follow.

There was less economic pressure on knitting than on spinning, too. Industrialisation tends to accelerate where systems are slowest, and spinning was the slowest part of textile production by a wide margin. Until that problem was solved, there was limited incentive to mechanise anything else. Woven cloth was also far more central to early modern economies than knitted goods, since it was used for uniforms, sails, trade goods, and household fabrics, all of which were produced and traded on an enormous scale. Knitted goods (stockings, caps, gloves) were vital to daily life but not to the large-scale economic systems that attracted investment and drove mechanisation. The pressure went toward spinning and weaving, and knitting was largely left to develop on its own terms.

It was also well adapted to domestic life in ways that made it difficult to dislodge. Knitting requires very little equipment, it is portable, and it can be set aside without much loss. It had always been done alongside other work: tending animals, managing a household, filling the long winter evenings. This was not a seasonal or marginal practice; across most of Britain, for most of this period, knitting was simply part of how households ran.

* * *

Structural reasons explain why knitting was not industrialised in the same way as spinning and weaving. Why hand knitting survived as a widespread domestic practice when hand spinning did not is a separate question, and more a matter of cultural history than economic history.

Spinning was useful and universal. As it moved into factories, there was no longer any reason to teach it to people who did not need it, and it carried no particular social value that might have kept it alive in homes where it was no longer economically necessary.

Knitting, for most of its history, had been much the same: a form of paid labour or household necessity, unglamorous and widespread. By the Victorian period, something had shifted. It had become a respectable leisure activity for women of the middle and upper classes, done in drawing rooms and at social gatherings. Victorian society had elevated “useful” needlework as a visible expression of feminine virtue and respectability. This drove a publishing economy around it: pattern books, magazines, instructions for increasingly elaborate work. The knowledge was actively circulated to people who came to it for pleasure rather than necessity. At the same time, knitting was being taught in workhouses and charitable schools, to orphans and the poor, as a skill that could generate a modest income. It functioned simultaneously as a polite accomplishment and as a form of poor relief, and both uses kept it in circulation.

Wartime reinforced it further, starting in the 1850s with the Crimean War, where women were encouraged to send “templar hoods” or “helmet liners” to the front, which eventually became known as “balaclavas”, named after the site of an important battle. Both world wars also produced large-scale civilian knitting campaigns, with millions of people producing clothing and equipment for troops. The campaigns were organised, publicised, and socially pressured in ways that sustained knitting through periods when it might otherwise have declined.

None of those reinforcing mechanisms existed for spinning. By the time the factory had made domestic spinning unnecessary, there was nothing to sustain it.

* * *

Crochet’s story is quite different from knitting’s, despite the crafts sharing many similarities.

Its origins are disputed: some trace it to Europe in the early nineteenth century; others argue for older roots. What is clearer is that by the mid-nineteenth century, it was popular in Britain and Ireland both as a hobby and as a way of supplementing income through lace-like work. Queen Victoria crocheted and reportedly gave away items she had made, which gives some sense of how fashionable it had become at the highest levels of society.

Where crochet’s story diverges most clearly from knitting’s is in its relationship to machines. Knitting was eventually industrialised: the flat-bed and circular machines that produce most knitted fabric today are true knitting machines, reproducing what hand knitting does at an enormous scale. Crochet has not been mechanised in the same way. Machines that produce crochet-like fabric typically do so using knitting technology, imitating the look rather than reproducing the construction. Crochet is formed from a single active loop, continuously manipulated with a hook, and that motion has complications for industrial automation.

Crochet’s story, then, is less about surviving the industrial revolution than about bypassing it. Part of the reason it was never industrialised is simply that by the time it became widespread, the textile machinery already in existence had been built around different processes, and there was no obvious incentive to start again from a different direction.

* * *

Most knitted fabric today is made in factories. The circular machines that produce jersey and the flat-bed machines used for shaped knitwear are largely automated, part of the same global supply chain that the textile revolution created. The industrial version of knitting is real and here to stay.

Hand knitting persists alongside it. I previously wrote about how, even with a knitting machine, I would not stop knitting by hand. They scratch a very different itch. That distinction is probably what kept the hand version alive through everything else: there was always a reason to keep doing it, and enough people across enough generations kept passing that reason on.

Further reading

The history of hand knitting, V&A: a broad overview of knitting’s development, from medieval guild workers to the present day.

Knitting for Victory, The History Girls: on the organised wartime knitting campaigns, from the Crimean War through to the Second World War.

Knitting and domestic life, Victorian style, Modern Daily Knitting: on knitting as a respectable drawing-room accomplishment in the nineteenth century,and the publishing economy it produced.

The sleeves turned out to be comically long, about ten centimetres past where they should end. This goes well beyond the territory of folding up your cuffs and into something harder to explain.

My first feeling was embarrassment, which gave way fairly quickly to genuine puzzlement. I rewrite every pattern I knit into a spreadsheet before I start: running totals of width and length at each stage, cross-checked against the schematic, so I can catch problems before they are knitted into the fabric. If there is shaping involved, I track how many increases happen on each row, add them to the stitch count, and update the width. For length, since I know my gauge, I can calculate exactly how many rows each measurement should take. It is the kind of system that is supposed to prevent exactly this, and somehow it did not, and I have not yet worked out why. I don’t feel like investigating the error right now, so my current way of dealing with it is exclaiming “Look at my sleeves!” as soon as I see people. It is not the most rational response, but it does seem to be helping.

* * *

The next sweater I am planning is also a set-in sleeve construction, which puts the same category of error squarely back on the table. This time I am being more thorough than usual. My partner spent Saturday morning helping me measure different parts of my body, tape measure and notepad in hand, patient throughout in a way I was grateful for. I have also been working through Faina Goberstein’s Craftsy course, Sizing Knitwear Patterns, which goes through how to take body measurements and calculate each piece of a sweater. Set-in sleeves are less forgiving than other construction styles, and the extra preparation may feel fussy, but in my case it is clearly necessary.

I am hoping the preparation makes a difference. Set-in sleeves are unforgiving enough that I am not expecting certainty, but at least this time I will have done the groundwork.

* * *

The week was not all fit disappointment and anxiety. A friend turned thirty recently, and I had knit him a pair of cabled socks as a gift. He messaged to say they fit perfectly and he’s already looking forward to the cooler season again. It is a reasonable way to end a week that started with a phantom ten centimetres of ribbed fabric.

I have knit a lot of socks by hand, both cuff-down and toe-up. Over time I have tried most of the common heel constructions: heel flap and gusset, short row, afterthought and instathought (peasant) heels, Fleegle, and a few others. My toes, however, have almost always been wedge-style: four increases or decreases at the sides of the foot, finished with grafting for cuff-down socks or begun with Judy’s Magic Cast On for toe-up.

Since I started making socks on my flatbed machine, I noticed that most machine knitting patterns use a short row toe as well as a short row heel. This makes complete sense on a machine, where short rows are much faster and easier than decreases. Seeing these instructions reminded me that short row toes are equally possible in hand knitting, yet they do not seem especially popular.

In this post, I will explain how to work short row toes for both toe-up and cuff-down socks and suggest modifications for a more rounded shape. I will also look at why they are not more widely used, despite their advantages.

Why Short Row Toes Work

First, consider how a standard cuff-down wedge toe works. You make four decreases every other round until you have roughly one third of the original stitch count remaining, then graft the ends together. This creates a trapezoid-shaped pocket that conforms to the shape of the foot when worn.

If you have ever knit an afterthought or peasant heel, you may have noticed that the shaping process is identical to a wedge toe. In a toe, this shaping reduces the circumference of the sock as the foot narrows. In a heel, the same shaping increases the circumference around the widest part of the foot and introduces the angle that allows the fabric to transition from ankle to foot.

Short row heels can also replace peasant-style heels, producing a heel that is effectively identical in shape to one made with decreases. From this, it follows that the decrease-based shaping at the toe can equally be replaced with short rows.

Toe-Up Construction

For toe-up socks, begin with a provisional cast-on for half of the total stitch count. For a 64-stitch sock, this means casting on 32 stitches provisionally. Any provisional method works. A crochet provisional cast-on is the most common, but Judy’s Magic Cast On can also be used provisionally.

From there, work the toe exactly as you would a short row heel, using your preferred short row method: wrap and turn, German short rows, yarn-over short rows, or shadow wraps. Once the toe is complete, pick up the live stitches from the provisional cast-on and join in the round.

This approach is intuitive if you already knit short row heels. There is no new technique to learn, only a different starting point in the sock. It also appears to have been more common before 2006, before Judy’s Magic Cast On was popularised. For knitters using DPNs or short circular needles, this method avoids switching to magic loop, which is often required for the initial rounds when working toe-up. It also eliminates grafting, which many knitters are happy to avoid.

The main drawback is the provisional cast-on itself. Some knitters find it fiddly, and if you already use Judy’s Magic Cast On comfortably, the short row toe may not feel like a compelling alternative.

Cuff-Down Construction

For cuff-down socks, knit the foot to the point where the toe begins, then place half of the stitches on hold. This can be either the instep stitches or the sole stitches. The remaining stitches are worked back and forth in short rows, exactly as for a short row heel. Once the toe shaping is complete, graft the toe stitches to the held stitches.

One practical advantage is that, if you are using short circular needles, you can complete the entire sock without switching to DPNs or magic loop. You can stay on the same needles from cast-on to graft.

Grafting is not eliminated, only moved. With a cuff-down short row toe, the graft runs across the full stitch count rather than the smaller number used in a wedge toe. This can make it harder to achieve even tension, so it is worth practising before using this method on a finished sock.

Modifications: A Rounder Toe

Some knitters find a standard short row toe, like a standard wedge toe, slightly too pointed for their foot shape. With decrease-based wedge toes, a common adjustment is to work decreases every other round for the first half of the shaping, then every round for the second half. This produces a noticeably rounder result.

A similar adjustment works for short row toes. In the later stages of the shaping, instead of turning one stitch before the previous turning point, turn two stitches before it. This subtly increases the rate of shaping at the tip and produces a rounder toe.

Closing

Short row toes are not a better method, just a different one, and knowing them gives you more options. They are particularly useful if you already knit short row heels, if you work on short circular needles, or if you want to avoid closed cast-ons for toe-up socks. For cuff-down socks, they are a reasonable alternative to a wedge toe, with the trade-off that the graft is longer.

I ended up exploring them more after getting into machine knitting, where short rows are the default for both heels and toes. That experience nudged me to revisit the technique in hand knitting, and from there I started experimenting with stripes. With a short row toe, stripes can curve around the toe in a way that resembles intarsia, without the bother of multiple bobbins. It is something I have been developing and may turn into a future pattern.

Whether any of this makes short row toes worth trying depends on what you already do and what you find fiddly. In sock knitting, it is always good to mix things up, but in the end the method that makes you happy is the right one.