From knitted loop to crocheted stitch

17 March 201927 January 2025 stringbedLeave a comment

In the past few posts I’ve considered different approaches to the graphic description of looped fabric structures. Although largely in abstract terms thus far, my intention is to apply relevant aspects of them to the analysis of specific objects that have themselves been the focus of other posts or are in the queue for such treatment.

Analytic terminology has been another perennial favorite here. The subject this time around is a formal international standard that both defines and illustrates structural details of knitted fabric in terms that are applicable to other forms of loopcraft, as well. The extent of that applicability will be tested with a comparison between knitted stockinette fabric and slip stitch crochet.

I had previously suggested that crochet could be seen as a handicraft equivalent to warp knitting, using terms taken from the International Standard ISO 4921:2000, Knitting — Basic concepts — Vocabulary. This “defines terms for basic knitting concepts” applicable both to hand and industrial knitting although many of the definitions are only used in the latter context. A related standard ISO 8388:1998, Knitted fabrics — Types — Vocabulary, more explicitly “defines terms for industrially produced machine knitted fabrics” but is relevant to hand knitted fabric nonetheless.

The vocabularies in both are useful when comparing other aspects of crochet and knitting since they accommodate both symmetrical and asymmetrical loops, and define the terms “loop” and “stitch” separately. Although the symmetrical/asymmetrical distinction is not a factor in the categorization of all hand-knitted structures, it is manifested differently in crochet and is fundamental to all such fabric.

The ISO vocabulary is based on the following differentiation of a loop, a knitted loop, and a stitch. Although the term loop is used in a manner familiar to hand knitters, the combined term “kink of yarn” is preferred to the permissible alternative “loop of yarn.” This is immaterial to the following discussion except for two direct citations from the standard, where kink is replaced with an italicized loop.

A loop of yarn is defined as “a length of yarn that has been bent into a shape appropriate for its transformation into a weft-knitted or warp-knitted loop.” Three specimen forms are illustrated.

A “knitted loop” is then defined as “a loop of yarn that is intermeshed at its base.”

The one at the top is an “open loop,” defined as “a knitted loop in which the same thread enters and leaves the loop at opposite sides without crossing over itself” and noting that “the same applies to an open stitch.” The bottom right shows a “closed loop” — “a knitted loop at the base of which the thread crosses over itself” — and again “the same applies to a closed stitch.” The closed loop is also illustrated under its own heading but in neither instance are the two possible directions for the crossover labeled or even noted (“S” as shown here, or “Z” as in a following illustration; both are explained in the preceding post).

Finally, a “stitch” is “a loop of yarn that is intermeshed at its base and at its top.”

This illustration shows a “reverse stitch,” also called a “back stitch” and is explicitly “not the same as a purl stitch” (which means slightly different things in hand and industrial knitting). There is a separate illustration of a “face stitch,” also called a “plain stitch” or a “stocking stitch.” The difference is that the face stitch is “so intermeshed in the fabric that its legs are situated over the top arc of the stitch formed in the same wale in the previous course.”

The terms wale and course correspond to the more familiar column and row but explicitly refer to sequences of stitches and not loops. It is also significant that the term “stitch” is not further specified as a knitted stitch and its definition includes a broad scope note.

“A stitch may be combined with a float, and different types of knitted loops and stitches may be combined in a unit of stitches or an arrangement of stitches.
≠ a knitted loop”

The named arrangements of stitches include a “binding-off course” defined as, “a new row of loops, each one transferred to the adjoining wale and forming a ladderproof chain of loops at the top end of a knitted article.”

The lateral repositioning of the knitted loop changes the fabric structure from symmetrical to asymmetrical but the the loop retains its basic identity. When the loop in the adjoining wale is knitted through it, the initial loop is intermeshed at its base and top, thereby becoming a stitch. The ISO vocabulary doesn’t have a name for it, but it follows from the definition of the binding-off course that it would be called a chain stitch.

The preceding illustration is a detail from the upper end of a piece of knitted fabric that can be extended with an arbitrary number of lower courses of knitted stitches. There is also a type of crocheted fabric that consists of multiple courses of chain stitches identical to those in the binding-off course. This has the slip stitch structure illustrated in numerous previous posts and is seen in this drawing taken from a description of a bootee in the collections of the National Museums of Scotland, by Audrey Henshall. (It is also shown in earlier posts, erroneously drawn with the yarn fed from the front in what crocheter’s call the “inverse” form of a slip stitch, discussed further below.)

All documentation of this fabric prior to the 1820s describes it as “a species of knitting,” with the word “crochet” only used to designate the hook. It can also be seen as a form of knitted fabric according to the ISO definition. Nonetheless, it is now primarily associated with crochet. The vertical intermeshing of one course of chain stitches with another is the definitive attribute of its simplest form, alternately termed slip stitch crochet or single crochet (UK).

A bind-off course fashioned with knitting needles requires all of the knitted loops to be held on the needle until they are worked successively into chain stitches on the next pass. With a crochet hook, the knitted loops are taken onto the tool individually and immediately intermeshed into chain stitches. This is also the more practicable technique for working courses of chain stitches into crocheted fabric.

Regardless of how the fabric illustrated in the two preceding drawings can be produced, the chains in both have the same structural characteristics. The loops all lean to the right, they are all open, and the tool is inserted into the front leg of the preceding stitch. The legs of the new loop pass behind it, forming reverse stitches.

Another of the drawings of slip stitch crochet that’s already been used several times on this blog, by Annemarie Seiler-Baldinger, shows a different configuration. The knitted loops lean to the right here as well but they are closed (with a Z crossing). They are also worked into the back edge of the preceding stitch but their legs pass in front of it, forming face stitches.

The correlation between the variant forms of this structure and the procedural aspects of their production as slip stitch crochet were discussed in depth in the preceding post, deferring a few relevant details for later consideration. One of them is the difference between face and reverse stitches. This correlates basically to whether the yarn is held in back or in front of the fabric, with the hook inserted into it from the front or back, while the loops and stitches are formed.

This maps directly into the colloquial knit and purl of hand knitting. However, the latter term is not widely recognized in crochet and the labeling of reverse stitches is a matter of recurring debate. Slip stitch crocheters commonly refer to them as “inverse slip stitches,” which needn’t be taken any further for now. However, the concept of inverse does not scale as clearly into more complex crochet stitches.

One further property of a slip stitch can make the analysis of fabric produced with it more difficult than that of fabric made with the stocking stitch. In the latter, the initial loop will be propagated into the stitch either open or closed and retained that way in the fabric. With the slip stitch, a new loop that is worked into the front edge of a stitch in the preceding course, applies a vertical force to that stitch which can reverse its open or closed characteristic.

The two-loops-in-one attribute of crochet makes it a compound structure and therefore nominally comparable to the one-loop-over-two compound knitting discussed here, and illustrated with this schematic drawing by Marianne Eriksson.

However, the mechanical dynamics of the intrinsically compound slip stitch and those of the stocking stitch whether compound or not, are fundamentally different. This is one of the limitations on the describability of crochet and knitting using the same terms — but also provides fuel for additional posts.

Looped Fabric

Drawing pains: the slip stitch

10 March 201922 November 2021 stringbed2 Comments

The preceding two posts present formal numerical and graphical procedures for analyzing and describing looped fabric structures. By intriguing coincidence, the first of the cited publications was issued at the time when attested documentary and material evidence of slip stitch crochet was first beginning to appear. Similarly, the later texts were published when slip stitch crochet was shifting from being a primary means for fabric production to an ancillary technique.

It therefore seems appropriate to examine a few drawings of early fabric with a slip stitch structure that are puzzling in one way or another to see if any aspect of the contemporaneous methodologies might make it easier to understand them. I won’t be going near the mathematics of those approaches but will be considering the applicability of some of their procedural details to the analysis of looped fabric.

In suitably adapted terms, a stitch can be described by the path the thread takes through the loop(s) to which it is anchored and the number of times it crosses over itself before moving into the next anchor loop(s) in the preexisting fabric. This is characterized by the location and direction of the crossovers, permitting a point-by-point comparison of two structures that appear to be similar but may actually differ in some important regard. A typical such question is whether a right-handed and a left-handed worker executing the same instructions from the respective points of view produce fabric structures that are true mirror images of each other.

I’ve devoted several previous posts to slip stitch crochet and will start this one with a reprise of drawings from one of them. Nothing will be said that’s not already familiar to a slip stitch crocheter. However, two of the following illustrations were published as descriptions of nalbinding and this review may be worthwhile from the perspective of that craft. It is otherwise intended as a preliminary exercise in the analysis of illustrated structures that are either not associated with extant fabric or in some other regard are questionable representations of the objects from which they were drawn.

The first of the illustrations shown before is a textbook drawing of the “plain crochet stitch,” by Annemarie Seiler-Baldinger.

The accompanying text says, “the thread is drawn through an upper stitch of the previous row and through the stitch last formed.” However, in the original German from which this was translated, ‘upper stitch’ is obere Maschenschlinge, which is literally ‘upper loop of the stitch.’ In current craft parlance this is the ‘back leg of the loop,’ normally contracted to ‘the back loop’ and abbreviated as BLO (back loop only). Working through the front leg of the loop is similarly abbreviated FLO.

The second repeated drawing, by Audrey Henshall, illustrates the structure of a child’s bootee in the collections of the National Museums of Scotland, in Edinburgh. It also shows a BLO slip stitch but in contrast to Seiler-Baldinger’s drawing, where the back leg of the loop leads forward into the following stitch, in this drawing it is the front leg of the loop that leads forward.

If the legs here are seen as uncrossed, in the Seiler-Baldinger drawing they are crossed. The direction of such crossings is often indicated using the familiar descriptors for the twisting and plying of yarn.

This gives S-crossings and Z-crossings, with Seiler-Baldinger showing the latter. The alternative is to label them as left-over-right and right-over-left, but those designations depend on the point of view.

The path the yarn takes around a crochet hook and the direction in which the loops are worked determine whether their legs are crossed or uncrossed. The variables are normally designated as right-to-left or left-to-right — RTL and LTR — and as yarn-over-hook or yarn-under-hook — YO and YU. Here right and left do indicate direction unambiguously but YO and YU are less clear.

An additional complication pertains to the so-called ‘inverse’ slip stitches, where the yarn is held in front of the fabric and the hook is inserted into its back, also reversing the structural effects of YO and YU. (This additionally causes the legs of a new loop to pass behind the side of the stitch it is anchored to, as seen in Henshall’s drawing, rather in front of it as in all the other drawings shown here.) The qualifiers clockwise and counterclockwise are therefore sometimes used to avoid confusion. However, doing so requires an explanation of the point of view.

I’m reluctant to suggest coined alternatives (although the following one is not entirely my own) but will note that the S/Z model can also be applied to the direction in which the yarn is wrapped around the hook (or a knitting needle), with YO being an ‘S-wrap’ and YU a ‘Z-wrap’ — YS and YZ. The utility of doing so is worth greater explanation, which I’ll provide in a separate post on the further mechanics of crossovers in slip stitches, but will keep to the familiar abbreviations in the meanwhile.

Seiler-Baldinger’s illustration of the slip stitch structure is oriented LTR rather than RTL as more commonly appears in tutorial contexts. The two forms are mirror images of each other by implication but it is necessary to be certain that they truly are so. Reversing the direction of Seiler-Baldinger’s drawing is easy enough, as shown here by Ella Hildebrand, in a style that more clearly reveals the three-dimensionality of loopwork.

The remaining question is which crossover points need to be inverted to reproduce the illustrated structure in actual fabric. The front and back legs of the loop have the same position in either working direction, leaving the yarn wrap as the only directly controllable variable. As long as we’re dealing with fabric where all rows are worked in the same direction, if the direction of the yarn wrap is changed when the working direction is, everything else falls into place. This was also prescribed in instructions from 1800, describing practice prior to 1780 (discussed further here).

“Hook knitting can also be worked from the left as with ordinary knitting. The only difference is the positioning of the thread. Instead of leading it under the shaft as usual, it is first passed over the shaft and then led under it.”

Since the present-day default for crochet is YO, the reference to YU as being usual before 1780 is significant. In fact, it took a while before crochet instructions regularly prescribed YO as the standard. The earliest known instructions, published in 1785 explicitly illustrate FLO hook knitting being worked YU and RTL, but note that LTR is also possible (fully described here).

Yet another slip stitch variant is shown in a drawing, by Gudrun Böttcher, of a test swatch explicitly illustrating slip stitch crochet (“Häkeln: Kettenmaschen”). The new loop is again worked through the back leg of the corresponding loop in the preceding row, RTL, but is now YO.

Böttcher shows a futher variant of the slip stitch in a drawing of a child’s sock in the collections of the Museum der Kulturen in Basel. The difference this time is that the new loop is worked FLO, again YO in the illustrated RTL working direction. (The published drawing is rotated 180° here to ease the comparison.)

This now brings nalbinding clearly into the discussion. For some enigmatic reason, Böttcher says that the preceding illustration is of a nalbound structure and alternative “techniques such as…crochet [can] immediately be eliminated from consideration.”

Audrey Henshall also described the Edinburgh bootee as nalbinding. However, that was in 1952, when the research community was abuzz with interest in recently published descriptions of that craft, and none of its members were writing about slip stitch crochet or could even be expected to recognize it. I’ve explained my reasons for believing that the bootee is, in fact, archetypal Scottish shepherd’s knitting (the indigenous form of slip stitch crochet) in a previous post titled A Tale of Two Bootees.

Admitting to some poetic license in that title and taking another step toward the telling of the tale’s remaining half, the second bootee is the child’s sock shown in Böttcher’s drawing above. There is no question about the slip stitch being readily produceable with an eyed needle, However, it does not follow that an entire garment with a basic slip stitch structure but also includes shaped construction details such as the toe and heel of a sock, can as plausibly be nalbound as it can be crocheted.

Böttcher doesn’t go beyond the drawing of the stitch structure and says nothing at all about the construction of the sock. However, the article that includes her explicitly labeled drawing of slip stitch crochet also provides an explanation of the general method she used to draw the structures of older pieces of ostensibly nalbound fabric. That’s a blogworthy topic in its own right to which I’ll soon be turning my attention, and will discuss her drawings of the Basel sock further in it (as well as providing full bibliographic details for all of her articles cited above).

Looped Fabric

Crochet as warp knitting

10 February 201922 November 2021 stringbed3 Comments

I ended the preceding post with what I thought was a radical suggestion about simple crochet being a handicraft equivalent to industrial warp knitting. It was intended as an upbeat to a more detailed consideration of the use of hook-tipped needles in all forms of mechanized knitting, beginning with the stocking frame invented by William Lee in 1589.

While attempting to date the advent of warp knitting machines, I found an article by R. Wheatley titled “The Warp Knitting Story” in a publication from 1989 commemorating Lee’s invention, Four Centuries of Machine Knitting. The article begins:

“Warp knitting is the mechanical equivalent of hand crochet knitting and remained as a hand operation until almost 200 years after the invention of the weft knitting machine in 1589.

The invention of the warp knitting machine in 1775 is attributed to Crane of Ilkeston in Derbyshire who applied warp guides to the hand frame and so modified the original invention by William Lee…”

Although this can’t be taken as evidence of crochet being practiced in 1589, it does indicate that from the industrial perspective, the notion of crochet as warp knitting is quite acceptable. The hook-tipped needle is a fundamental element of both warp and weft knitting machines. Here is an engraving of the central component of the latter, taken from an array of illustrations of its other details in a treatise on industrial knitting from 1785, platiere-hooks

with the process shown in a recent image (from Wikimedia Commons).

maschenbildung_1

The text from 1785 includes no illustrations of warp knitting machines despite their having been invented ten years earlier, nor any images related to hand knitting with the exception of the plain crochet discussed in an earlier post.

platiere

The similarity between the manual technique shown here and the core element of present-day mechanized warp knitting is apparent.

warp-hook

This adds at least one “warp guide” to each needle, used to wrap the yarn around it in a manner that corresponds directly to the same operation in hand crochet. The warp guide is also used to shift the yarn to an adjacent needle enabling one wale (column) in the fabric to be worked laterally into another. This means that weft knitting differs from warp knitting in the same categorical manner that distinguishes knitting from crochet. The simplest variant of the former is only worked vertically into the corresponding loop in the preceding course (row), and plain crochet is additionally worked laterally into the adjacent loop in the same row.

The preceding illustration shows a latch hook, explaining the protuberance on its left side. The earlier illustrations show “bearded” hooks, and machines employing them require an additional mechanism to hold them closed when pulled backward through the loops. This is called a “sinker bar” and it also holds the yarn against the needles while the stitches are being worked.

This explains a term that appears in the glossary of machine knitting but not that of hand knitting. What is normally regarded as the loop in a knit stitch is further qualified as a “needle loop,”

and the connection between two adjacent loops in the same course is called a “sinker loop.”

loops and lag

Both illustrations are taken from a formal international standard (ISO 4921:2000) detailing “Knitting — Basic concepts — Vocabulary.” It fully defines a needle loop as “the unit formed by the top arc and the two sides of the weft-knitted loop,” and a sinker loop as “the yarn portion that connects two adjacent needle loops belonging to the same knitted course.”

There is nothing apparent to be gained by introducing the term “sinker loop” into the vocabulary of hand knitting. However, its ISO definition is of more than passing interest from the systematological perspective. It describes a looped connection between the stitches in adjacent wales, in addition to the vertical looped structures that form the individual wales. As noted above, that lateral connection is otherwise the structural attribute that differentiates crochet and knitting.

The pivotal difference is that both sides of a needle loop are in physical contact with the needle loop below it in the same wale. In contrast, only one side of a sinker loop engages with the preceding needle loop in the same wale. If seen as a terminological issue, describing the difference between the number of points of contact would require its adjectival indication. Although of less immediate utility in a craftsperson’s glossary, that number can also be indicated directly.

In fact, the number of points at which a knot crosses over itself is an important factor in the mathematical theory of knots. Papers on that topic are sometimes illustrated with the familiar looped structures of yarncraft, and an early (if not the earliest) such presentation is explicitly intended to be of use in describing and categorizing them. I’ll provide at least introductory detail about it in the following post.

* * * *

Further details about the 1785 text can be found here.
The use of a crochet hook for plain knitting in wire is discussed here.
The differences between warp and weft knitting are explained in detail here.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) knitting vocabulary is presented in full here.

Looped Fabric

The True Stitch

3 February 201922 November 2021 stringbed6 Comments

My recent visit to the Museum der Kulturen in Basel included a stop at their library to fetch a copy of a visitor’s guide to an exhibition of the Fritz Iklé collection of textiles, displayed at several locations in Switzerland during 1935. It was titled Primäre textile Techniken (Primary Textile Techniques) and the accompanying booklet includes an essay by Iklé on the way he grouped the objects according to the techniques of their manufacture. He labeled one of the groups “Looping a single working thread” (Verschlingung eines Arbeitsfadens) and another “Working multiple threads” (Verarbeitung vieler Fäden).

Kristin Oppenheim placed Iklé’s categories and terminology in a more rigorous framework in her Systematik der textilen Techniken (Systematics of Textile Techniques), published in 1942 (discussed in detail in a previous post noted below and reviewed briefly here). She expanded this text in 1948 in collaboration with her husband Alfred Bühler, who was the director of what was then the Museum of Ethnography in Basel. Their joint work on systematics was part of a catalog of the Iklé collection, which he bequeathed to the museum.

The Bühler-Oppenheim classification system was applied to an extensive study of Maschenstoffe in Süd- und Mittelamerika (Mesh Fabric in South and Central America), presented as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Basel in 1969 and as a book in 1971. Its author, Annemarie Seiler-Baldinger was on the academic staff of the Museum of Ethnography at the time and Bühler was her PhD advisor.

Seiler-Baldinger published a revised edition of the classification system in 1973, separated from the listing of objects in the Iklé collection that was fundamental to the 1948 edition. This retained the title Systematik der textilen Techniken, with a preface by Bühler, and she expanded it again in 1991. An often-cited English translation of that edition appeared in 1994 as Textiles: a Classification of Techniques.

During the interval between the initial Bühler-Oppenheim edition and the Seiler-Baldinger revision, in 1966, Irene Emery published her equally well-known The Primary Structures of Fabric: an Illustrated Classification. This presented a comparable classification system but was ordered on the basis of the structural detail of fabric, rather than by the techniques used for producing those structures. Emery acknowledged the works of Bühler, Iklé, and Oppenheim cited above, but as they all rely on the same basic elements, it is not clear how far Emery was influenced by her predecessors.

Seiler-Baldinger included Emery’s terminology in her own books, in lists of foreign language equivalents appended to the definitions of individual German terms. However, the English and German vocabularies are not fully concordant and Seiler-Baldinger didn’t always have semantically equivalent terms to choose from. The resulting imprecision was not resolved as carefully as it might have been when her German text was subsequently translated into English.

The conceptual framework underlying the entire sequence of German publications makes a categorical distinction between Kettenstoffe and Maschenstoffe, literally meaning “warp fabrics” and “stitch fabrics.” The latter comfortably embraces the loop-based structures produced by crochet, knitting, nalbinding, and other techniques, without using the name of any specific one of them to label the category itself.

There is no directly equivalent English term for Maschenstoffe. Seiler-Baldinger uses “mesh fabrics,” which otherwise designates an attribute shared by both knit and woven fabric. The more widely used “non-woven fabric” also includes structures that are not loop based, and is beset by the systematological weakness of categorizing something by what it is not.

In his seminal text, Iklé discussed distinctions between various forms of looping, braiding, and weaving. He organized his exhibition accordingly but expressed no particular concern with a systematic classification of the represented techniques. However, he ascribed an interesting property to Maschenstoffe that might be worth consideration in the growing discussion of how the terms ‘stitch’ and ‘knitting’ should and should not be used.

Iklé recognized an array of loop-based techniques but separated knitting from the others.

“Knitting (the true stitch) [die echte Masche] is treated as something entirely different from the preceding ones, even if its results can bear a superficial resemblance to a braided stitch [Flechtstich].”

He was describing the basis for the arrangement of the material on display, placing knitting in a historical rather than structural niche of its own. Nonetheless, calling it “the true stitch” suggests that he saw some additional hierarchical distinction. Whatever that might have been, it reasonably equates Maschenstoffe and Kettenstoffe to ‘knits’ and ‘wovens’ in the familiar fabric-store sense.

Folding that back into a formal classification scheme, plain knitting and plain weaving (as defined by Emery) can serve as structural archetypes based on the comparability of their respective simplest forms. The warp and weft of plain weaving correlate to the wales (columns) and courses (rows) of plain knitting, each forming a right-angled grid.

When seen in this light, the consistent early characterization of slip stitch crochet as “a species of knitting” makes a good deal of sense, as does its subsequent Victorian renaming to “plain crochet.” I’ll illustrate the relationship between the structure of plain crochet and that of plain knitting in a separate post. It’s doubtful that new descriptive terms are necessary but slip stitching could also be described as asymmetrical compound knitting, if not as a handicraft correlate to the warp knitting that is otherwise regarded exclusively as a facet of industrial knitting.

* * * *

Other texts by Fritz Iklé appear in a number of previous posts.
More information about the classification systems that follow the groupings in his exhibition guide follow a detailed discussion of slip stitch crochet here.
Terminological aspects of the description of knit fabric are considered at length in several articles in the current issue of the Archaeological Textiles Review.

Looped Fabric

The tale of the second bootee

24 January 201924 December 2024 stringbed1 Comment

In the last few posts, I’ve been working my way toward the description of a baby’s sock in the collections of the Museum der Kulturen in Basel. If correctly dated, it could be the oldest object with a slip stitch structure that has yet been noted. It is described as nalbinding in previous documentation, rather than as the slip stitch crochet it is more likely to be. The sock has also been associated with the textile production of Coptic Egypt, which although rich in both simple and compound nalbound material, would make it far older than any other evidence of slip stitch fabric, regardless of the production method.

This increases the care needed in examining the chronological and technological records, and if necessary, setting them straight. If the colloquial information about the sock’s provenance should prove even roughly to be correct, it would allow for slip stitch fabric to have emerged around 1,000 years before the earliest firm date in the 1780s that can otherwise be set to it. Radiocarbon dating would immediately rein this in to a more useful interval, assuming that it is not of more recent origin than can be dated with that method, at all.

If it should prove to have been nalbound, slip stitch crochet could arguably have developed as an alternate technique for producing at least that one form of nalbinding. Pending a more precise dating of the sock, this would still suggest an earlier date for the origins of crochet than the one currently accepted. Adding a single new stitch to the already extensive repertoire of nalbinding would be less dramatic but interesting nonetheless.

The third possibility is that the provenance of the sock was misrepresented by the dealer from whom it was purchased, and that it lacks any actual association with either Coptic or early Islamic Egypt. Even so, slip stitch crochet is a traditional practice in Northwest Africa and the sock can reasonably be seen as evidence of its broader range. Again, its radiometric dating might indicate how far back that tradition can be traced, with greater objective potential for shifting perceptions of the craft’s age.

I had been waiting to blog about any of this until I had seen the actual sock and not just photographs of it. That finally happened a fortnight before this post was published, when my friend Anne Marie Decker and I were generously given access to the early non-woven Egyptian fabric in the storerooms of the Museum der Kulturen, by the acting Head of the African Department, Isabella Bozsa.

Anne is better equipped than anyone else I know to identify secondary structural detail that might definitively reveal whether the sock was produced with an eyed needle or a hook. If no such determination could be made, we would then consider stylistic attributes that might indicate the more likely method. There was also a small pouch among the objects shown to us that had the same slip stitch structure, so in fact, there were two pieces that we could take into consideration.

We were unable to locate any detail in either that could only have been produced with an eyed needle, and Anne found something she believed might preclude that possibility outright. However, there hasn’t yet been time for her to confirm this experimentally. All structural details of both the sock and the pouch are otherwise fully congruent with hook-based slip stitching. The sock also differs from comparable nalbound objects in pivotal stylistic regard.

We’ll be preparing a proper report about this as soon as we can manage and I’ll be focusing in greater detail on selected aspects of the history of slip stitch fabric and its structural classification, in separate posts.

Anne and I proceeded from Basel to Copenhagen where we both gave presentations at a conference earlier this week on Current Research in Textile Archaeology along the Nile. My presentation is available here, starting at the 19’04” mark, and includes illustrations and commentary specific to the sock and pouch, as well as other evidence of early slip stitch crochet. (There are a number of options for displaying the presentation and selecting “Slides” is preferable to the default “Screen.” What may seem to be an inordinate amount of hand-waving is an unfortunate consequence of the camera angle.) Anne’s presentation places the Basel objects in a far broader context of simple and compound nalbinding, and is located here.

Looped Fabric

Slip stitch crochet in Germany 1780-1800

1 January 201922 November 2021 stringbedLeave a comment

The earliest text describing and comparing various forms of hand knitting that has yet come to light is “The art of knitting in its full extent” (Die Kunst zu stricken in ihrem ganzen Umfange), published in 1800 by Johann Friedrich Netto and Friedrich Leonhard Lehmann. An earlier post covered their description of work with hook tipped knitting needles. The following material extends this with their discussion of knitting with a single hook-tipped tool, identical to the one from 1785 illustrated in the preceding post. The reference date for their introductory mention of it as “not an entirely new invention” was 1780 but they don’t indicate how long before then the described technique was in practice.

Chapter 9: Knitting…with needles and hooks

§ 39

“The hook knitting mentioned previously is not an entirely new invention but was once limited to winter shoes and boots. Primarily in Leipzig, the uppers of many hundreds of pairs of shoes were knit from ordinary white sheep wool yarn with a hook that was commonly made from the handle of a spoon to save expense. (A more exact description of this follows below in the explanation of the plates.) The knitted shoe uppers were then dyed black, fitted with soles and heels, lined with coarse felt, and shipped far and wide.

The simplicity and rapidity of this hook knitting caught our attention and we were delighted by the complete success of our attempts at using it for other forms of knitting. One can knit all sorts of colored borders, flowers, arabesques, etc., with the hook, just as with knitting needles.

The hook used for this is illustrated on Plate 15, Images 1, 2, and 3. First one wraps a single simple loop around it (see the small number 1 on the hook in image 1) and holds it in the left hand exactly as illustrated, so that the notch in the tip of the hook is on the left side. The thread is then led under the shaft as shown at number two (at the notch on image 1) and positioned in the notch above toward the right side. From here, the right hand draws the hook under the left, whereby the left hand slides the loop over both the newly formed stitch and the tip of the hook. The thread is placed repeatedly under the shaft and over the tip of the hook and the new loop is drawn through the old.

When the first row is finished and one wishes to knit back again from the right hand side, as with a blanket, the hook is inserted leftward into the last stitch (one remains on the hook) from below. Working in the same direction as just taught, the thread is again led under the hook and up over the notch, as shown on the plate. The left hand then slides off two stitches (see the hook in image 3), namely the one that was on the hook at number 2, and the one newly formed by inserting through 1 over 3. This continues by repeatedly inserting the hook to the left into the adjacent stitch.

netto-hooks

Plate 15

The hooks for knitting on Plate 15 must be made in the following manner. The shaft may not be over one sixth of an inch thick [Leipzig standard ≈ 4 mm], at most, i.e. like a medium knife blade. The shape of the hook is conical to make it all the more convenient to slide off the stitches and can be half an inch wide at the bottom. The point of the hook must turn inwards, so that it does not snag when pulling through. No. 1 has a wooden handle but that can also be done without.

§ 40

If flowers and the like are to be added to the knitting, colored yarn is pulled into the first or second preceding stitch with a knitting needle that has a hook at its tip. Placing the flower on it, the colored thread is looped around the hook and worked into a stitch.

Hook knitting can also be worked from the left as with ordinary knitting. The only difference is the positioning of the thread. Instead of leading it under the shaft as usual, it is first passed over the shaft and then led under it. It is then drawn upward into the notch as seen on hook no. 2 [incorrectly ‘3’ in the original].

§ 41

Round pieces, for example oval rugs for covered floors, are also amenable to knitting with the hook. First a row of stitches is made about two feet long [565 mm] always knitting toward the right side. Then going diagonally down and back two stitches, oval rounds are knit to the left until the middle section reaches the intended size. A light-colored border can then be knit around it a half foot wide, and it can be decorated in the middle with arabesques or other leaf work in indigo colored yarn. When the border is done, another half foot is knit around it in the main color. Finally, the stitches are looped tightly together at the edge with the thread, one after the other.

§ 42

Stockings can also be knit with the hook. A row of stitches is made of a length that, when held together at its ends, has the width of the intended stocking. The hook is inserted into the first stitch that was made and a new one pulled through it so that the entire row forms a circle which is then knit continuously in the round. A stitch is increased by making a new loop as at the outset and pulling it again through the same stitch. A decrease, on the other hand, is worked into two adjacent stitches simultaneously.

§ 43

It need not be pointed out that the entire bodies of vests and leggings can be knit in this manner with the hook. For plush knitting, the thread on the second ball from which the pile is to be made (§ 10) is first placed in the notch and then pulled through in a loop. However, since the hook will be inserted deeply into the stitch, the thread from the pile ball needs to be pulled back a bit because the loop will otherwise be too long.

§ 44

Hook knitting is recommended above all for purses. The stitches for this are created by wrapping the thread as already described for hook no. 3. Picots are formed by wrapping the thread around the hook twice as on no. 2, before positioning it in the mouth of the hook, thereby forming a long stitch. Once the hook is pulled through, these long stitches need to be placed around a small stick or heavy needle, as with netting, until the hook comes around again and completes the proper stitch.

This hook knitting resembles the manner in which Dübois used his hooked knitting needles to knit with such amazing rapidity. We are convinced that many of our lovely readers will apply their special womanly artistry to this knitting and soon bring it to the highest perfection.”

The basic descriptions of the flat hook and its vertical orientation are essentially the same as those in de la Platière’s text from 1785. However, Netto and Lehmann provide more detail about changing the direction of the stitching at the end of a row worked flat, as with the blanket described at the end of §39.

The 1785 instructions simply note that a new stitch can be worked into the preceding one either from the right or from the left. One obvious way for changing the working direction would be to turn the notched-side of the hook accordingly. The 1800 instructions are more specific about this and leave the hook in the same position throughout. Instead, the direction of the work determines whether the yarn is wrapped around the hook yarn-under as is usual for German knitting and shown in Figs. 1 and 3, or the later crochet standard yarn-over shown in Fig. 2.

A cylindrical hook-tipped knitting needle is presumably better suited for holding a flower as described in §40 than a tapered flat hook would be. Given that Netto had both tools at hand, a question remains about why he neither mentions, nor perhaps even considered, the use of the cylindrical tool for hook knitting. That craft was on the verge of a major step toward “highest perfection” as the crochet that would be described only two decades later in Holland. It is reasonable to suspect that the pivotal coopting of the similarly cylindrical tambour needle — a tool with which Netto was otherwise fully familiar — had taken place by the time of his writing about hook knitting.

The German term for the plush knitting discussed in §43 is Felbel (possibly a cognate of velvet). The parenthetical reference to §10 leads to a description of making warm fabric by pulling a short loop of thinner yarn through every sixth stitch in the base fabric, or if greater warmth is desired, through every fourth stitch.

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Slip stitch crochet in France 1785

21 December 201822 November 2021 stringbedLeave a comment

The earliest instructions for any form of crochet yet noted are in the Roland de la Platière Encyclopédie Méthodique, from 1785. This includes an extensive section on industrial knitting, and manual “nail knitting” is used to illustrate the way an individual stitch is formed on a knitting machine. In contrast to the smooth-tipped needles now associated with hand knitting, a knitting machine works the yarn with hooks (in the manner a previous post suggests was applied to the far earlier Celtic and Viking wirework knitting; coming posts will discuss industrial knitting further). The Encyclopédie includes no illustrations of any other form of hand knitting.

The engraving appears in a separate volume and the caption provides additional detail:

platiere-full

Fig. A, Example of knitting done on a nail, a type of finger for a glove worked in twine, designed as represented in the drawing.
Fig. C, crochet substituted for the nail, shown at scale [in the printed edition].
Fig. D, crochet intended for use with very large objects, and which is larger to produce more open stitches.
Fig. B, Another example of tricot au clou made with a crochet.

Here are the instructions:

About nail knitting
Du tricot au clou

“This is the name given to a way of knitting gloves [gants] devised by off-duty soldiers using a nail with a bent tip or a more convenient special hook [crochet], done in the following manner. The wool or thread intended for this purpose is wrapped twice around the first two fingers of the left hand, forming a sort of double loop. The hook is inserted into it grabbing and pulling the rest of the thread through, forming a new loop. Then, without removing the hook from it, more thread is pulled through the stitch or loop just made. Continuing in this way a first row of stitches is formed, longer or shorter as needed for the designated object. These steps are reversed at the end of the row. That is to say, the hook is inserted into the side of the first stitch and the same process is continuously repeated. This forms a round piece of knitting with horizontally positioned stitches worked repeatedly into themselves.

The gloves are started at the tip of a finger. The fingers are all made separately and then joined by hand. It is necessary to hold the work firmly in the left hand since the hook is moved under the left thumb. It is inserted from the right into the lower side of the stitch and draws a new loop through each one successively.

A certain size thread is required for this work. If it is too fine, the action of the hook would soon wear it out. Additionally, the knitting is less resistant to crosswise stretching, and whatever material is used, and no matter how well it is worked, it cannot last as long as ordinary knitting.

The front side of this knitting is turned to the inside of gloves, so the back is shown here. It does not have the usual appearance of a purl stitch but more that of barleycorns arranged diagonally. Someone who does not know how these gloves are finished will be puzzled by how they were worked. Moreover, it is easy to vary the appearance of the stitches. Differences are produced by working them to the left or to the right, or into the top or the bottom [edge of the loop].”

The reference to stitches being worked to the left or right is particularly important. It highlights a facility provided by a flat hook held vertically that was lost when the orientation of a crochet hook changed to what is now customary. All that is necessary to reverse the direction of the stitching is to turn the hook accordingly. It points to the left in the illustration but can as easily point to the right. Its up-and-down movement while stitching has no aspect of right or left handedness, nor does the lateral direction in which it moves as the stitching progresses. (This appears again in a description of German slip stitch practice prior to 1780, published in 1800, that will be presented in a separate post.)

The scale of the “type of finger” shown in the illustration indicates that it is a mitten. Since the explicit term mitaine was in use at the time, it is unclear whether the separately made fingers in the instructions are the one in the illustration plus a thumb, or whether a full five-fingered glove is being described. Although the wording does seem to indicate the latter, its likelihood is reduced by the admonition about the technique not being appropriate for lighter yarn.

Regardless of how many fingers it has, turning a glove inside out after it is finished is reasonable in itself, and the stitch in progress is consistent with de la Platière’s instructions. Following them yields precisely the same front-loop-only yarn-under-hook slip stitch crochet that is described in the early Victorian instructions as “shepherd’s knitting” and is discussed in several previous posts. The appearance of the front side of such fabric is aptly described as “barleycorns arranged diagonally” (clearly shown in the photo of a Scottish bootee from circa 1780 in this post).

The part of the mitten in the illustration is still being worked and would therefore show the front of the fabric. Although it is difficult to see a match between it and the prescribed form of stitching, it has no resemblance whatsoever to the back of such fabric. If anything, that could be described as horizontally oriented stockinette, with the barleycorn analogy being totally inappropriate.

There is no apparent way to reconcile the discrepancies between the text, illustration, and results of following the instructions. However, it can be noted that they are no more extreme than corresponding flaws in the graphic and narrative components of most early descriptions of crochet and comparable crafts.

Looped Fabric

Defining Crochet — new research report

13 December 201822 November 2021 stringbedLeave a comment

I’ve been using this blog to record interesting bits and snippets of information as I’ve come upon them. The thought of subsequently compiling them into lengthier texts on specific topics has been in mind throughout. In fact, this blog started when my stockpile of such notes had grown to the point that they seemed worth sharing.

The blog’s front page includes a listing of Research Reports, seeded from the outset with an article on Early Tatting Instructions (currently unavailable pending extensive revision). I had already submitted an article on the early history of crochet to the journal Textile History, intending to use the blog for expanding on some of the topics that it only touched upon briefly, once it had been formally published.

That has now happened and I’m both pleased to announce that publication and eager to get started with the detailed presentation of the facets of crochet history that I’ve kept waiting. The article is titled Defining Crochet, was published online on 11 December 2018, and the printed edition appeared in late March 2019. Here is the Version of Record and the Research Reports available on this blog now include a postprint.

Looped Fabric

Crochet with an eyed needle

7 December 201822 November 2021 stringbed9 Comments

Schematic drawings of the slip stitch structure, identical to the ones seen in the preceding post, appear in published descriptions of other objects said to be nalbinding rather than crochet. Before considering individual such objects, I’m going to take a look at another way to use an eyed needle for producing not just crochet-type slip stitches but a variety of more complex structures normally identified as crochet.

In the present context, the difference between the two tools reduces to the single mechanical detail of whether the end that grasps the yarn is fully closed — an eye — or is open on one side — a hook. The former holds the yarn more firmly and constrains its separation from the tool. The latter allows the yarn to be removed and reattached at any time but is conducive to unintentional separation. Both tools are otherwise made with dull and pointed tips, although that attribute is more relevant to the (by no means unrelated) comparison of ordinary and tambour embroidery.

In 1966, Angela Huber was granted US Patent no. 3,228,212 for a Method of Hand Knitting and Knitting Needle, five years after filing a corresponding application in Austria.

“This invention relates to a method of hand knitting and a knitting needle for it. Both the method and the needle distinguish by being particularly simple because only a single thread and a single needle are employed.”

An eyed needle used to push a new loop through a preexisting one, gauging its size with an adjustable collar. The patent illustrates both knit-type and crochet-type looping, showing only the latter here. huber-patent

A tool of the same design was sold in the late 1960s as the “Grant One Needle Looper” with a pattern booklet titled Grant’s One Needle Looping. It was telemarketed shortly thereafter as “The Original K-Tel Knitter — a revolutionary new method of knitting and crocheting with one needle.”

There is no indication of the relationship between the Grant/K-Tel items and the Huber patent but the instruction booklet in the K-Tel package (and presumably also Grant’s) illustrates a “simplicity stitch” with essentially the same drawings as the preceding ones.

k-tel

This technique is currently marketed as Fauxchét® using a composite needle that is identical to a standard machine knitting 1×2 transfer tool (but trademarked nonetheless). It is again unclear if there is a relationship to the Huber patent.

As is seen in other videos in that series, an eyed needle can be used in the same manner to make crochet stitches of increasing complexity. This can be compared to the production of hand knitted fabric on a peg loom instead of knitting needles. In both cases, the adherents to the conventional technique are in a substantial majority and have varying opinions about the utility of the alternative.

A similar comparison can be made between the structurally identical cross-knit looping made with an eyed needle, and twisted-stitch knitting made with knitting needles. This highlights why the discussion of the structure of a piece of fabric so often needs to be separated from that of the various tools and techniques that can be used to produce it. This is further demonstrated by the basic principle of a sewing machine, which is to push a loop of thread through fabric using the eyed end of a needle, and that of a knitting machine, using what is essentially a battery of crochet hooks to create vertically chained knitted structures.

The eyed end of the needle is also commonly used in hand embroidery to pass the working thread between preexisting stitches and the base fabric without risk of piercing either. With all this it mind, it is reasonable to wonder why a second point is frequently seen on archaeologically recovered needles such as those found at the Viking settlement in Birka and currently on display at the Swedish History Museum.

Similar needles from an earlier Celtic settlement in Colchester are on display at the British Museum.

Just as it is frequently impossible to look at a piece of looped fabric and know what tools were involved in its production, a tool doesn’t always reveal what it was used for. It is safe to assume that it had a primary function. However, for example, it does not follow from the similarity between the second needle from the top in this photo and the needles used in the Nordic nalbinding tradition, as first documented in the 1940s, that the older implement was ever used for that craft. In fact, it cannot be proven that it was intended for work with yarn at all.

With the same caveat, if historical precedent for the production of crochet-type slip stitch fabric using an eyed needle can be established, one with two points at longer and shorter distances from the eye would easily support either of the techniques we’ve now seen.

Looped Fabric

A Tale of Two Bootees

23 November 20183 September 2025 stringbed2 Comments

Note: I examined the pair of Scottish child’s bootees discussed below on 8 April 2019. This revealed details that necessitate significant revision of the description initially provided by Audrey Henshall and my analysis of it. The bootees are the oldest credibly attributed exemplars of shepherd’s knitting and the possibly of their having been nalbound can safely be dismissed. A recent photograph and a summary review of the updated information appears in my article, the Evolution in Early Crochet: From Flat-Hook Knitting to Slip-Stitch Crochet, in the Winter 2020 issue of PieceWork, pp. 47–51. Printed and electronic editions can be obtained via a link on this blog’s Publications Page.

* * *

An extensive report by Audrey Henshall on Early Textiles Found in Scotland was published in 1952. Its primary scope was “fabrics from the Roman period to the 17th century which are likely to be of native production” but:

“One unexpected item in the collection [of the National Museum of Scotland] is an example of naalebinding or looped needle netting which it is desirable to record though outside the chronological limits of this paper. The naalebinding occurs on a pair of child’s shoes made about 1780. This type of work has been described and discussed fully by Dr Hald¹: it is known from the Iron Age in Scandinavia where it was used for mittens and caps and, though, rare, from the Middle Ages in other parts of Europe. These shoes are the only example of the work so far recognised in Great Britain. The fabric is worked with a needle, the stitches being a complex type of chain stitch which works into the former row as well as the current one. The general effect of the Scottish example, for which no exact parallel has been found, is of a fine, firm crochet.”

The footnoted reference is to Margrethe Hald’s Olddanske Tekstiler (Early Danish Textiles), published two years earlier. This played a seminal role in familiarizing researchers with nalbinding (a development described in a previous post). Henshall cites it elsewhere in her text and it is fair to suspect that it influenced her assessment of the shoes.

Since then, one additional nalbound item has appeared in a report on archeologically recovered material in Great Britain. This is the well-known sock found at the Viking settlement in York, described in detail by Penelope Walton in Textiles, Cordage and Raw Fibre from 16-22 Coppergate, from 1989. However, she doubts that it was manufactured in England and states:

“The only evidence that this technique was ever practised in the British Isles is to be found in an 18th century pair of child’s bootees in the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland (Henshall 1952).”

Henshall provides the following illustration of their structure.

henshall-slipstitch

This can be directly compared to Annemarie Seiler-Baldinger’s schematic drawing of slip stitch crochet (discussed in the preceding post).

slip-stitch

One key difference between them is that Seiler-Baldinger illustrates the loops with their legs crossed, producing closed stitches, while Henshall illustrates open loops. The two drawings also differ in the way the legs of the loop pass around the side of the stitch to which it is anchored in the preceding row. Seiler-Baldinger shows them passing in front and Henshall shows them passing behind. This correlates to the distinction slip stitch crocheters make between ordinary and ‘inverse’ stitches, or knitters make between knit and purl.

By showing each row as a separate strand, Henshall’s drawing provides a good schematic illustration of shepherd’s knitting, which when worked flat, is characterized by the yarn being cut at the end of each row. That craft has a strong attested connection with Scotland and it is reasonable to question whether Henshall correctly identified the tool and technique used to produce them. The earliest non-English descriptions of slip stitching with a hook are also from the 1780s. One is specifically about the production of shoes, adding further reason to pose that question.

The structure visible in the photograph Henshall captions “bootee in naalebinding” could similarly serve as a textbook illustration of slip stitch crochet worked with the flat shepherd’s hook explicitly identified with Scottish practice and illustrated in the other 1780s sources. She describes both the technique by which the bootees were made and a pivotal detail of their structure quite differently.

“This pair of child’s bootees of the 18th century is included because of the unusual technique employed to make them. The labels on the soles read ‘supposed to be made about the year 1780. Belonged to Agnes Taylor’s great-great-aunts. 1880.’ The uppers are a red wool fabric, the soles are leather. The dimensions are: length 4 3/4 ins., width 1 3/4 ins., height 3 ins.

The general appearance of the fabric is fine and close, rather like knitting or crochet, worked in an evenly spun red 3-ply wool. The fabric is a simple form of naalebinding. It is worked, with the wool threaded through a needle, in a series of stitches in rows working into the current and previous rows simultaneously. The joins between the lengths of the wool are visible in places either as knots or darned-in ends. The bootees are worked horizontally round and round with two converging lines of decreases on either side of the toe. It is uncertain if the top edge, which is finished with three horizontal ribs, is the beginning of the work. The ribs are formed by working the new row into the centre of the preceding row instead of the edge of it, the edge loops standing up on the outside surface making the ribs. The other edge is folded to meet under the foot and is attached to the sole.”

Notwithstanding Henshall having physically examined the bootees, it is difficult to reconcile her description of their structure and construction with the detail shown in her photograph. It does not appear to illustrate continuous horizontal rounds of stitching nor are the converging lines delimiting the toe clearly formed by decreases. The configuration of the top edge would draw no comment if the bootee were crocheted. The use of shorter lengths of yarn is consistent with both nalbinding and flatwork shepherd’s knitting. However, in the former case one would expect them to be joined in barely visible splices worked directly into the yarn. Darned-in ends are more indicative of shepherd’s knitting.

That craft was still practiced in Scotland in Henshall’s day with little modification, using a flat hook locally termed a cleek. However, the research community had not yet taken notice of it or any other form of slip stitch crochet. In light of the interest that Hald had recently focused on nalbinding, explaining the bootees as having been produced with an eyed needle pulling a single strand of yarn is understandable.

Henshall also illustrates how a slip stitch can be formed in that manner.

Even if this is taken to be as viable a technique as is the use of a hook, the contextual support for the bootees being shepherd’s knitting contraindicates any other technique. However, additional objects that crocheters would identify as evidence of their craft have been described as nalbinding. Some of this material was made after the establishment of modern crochet and is therefore of no historical consequence to it.

From the nalbinding perspective there is a further issue about whether the structure illustrated by Henshall and also seen in the piece remaining to be described, has a proper place in that craft’s stitch repertoire. This does not diminish the significance of the objects this post was named for. Admitting to some poetic license in the title, the second bootee is actually a baby’s sock, noteworthy because it has been associated with Coptic Egypt as discussed in detail in a separate post.

Identifying secondary structural characteristics that might differentiate slip stitch fabric made respectively by nalbinding and crochet is therefore worth some effort. If it can indeed be determined that slip stitch fabric was produced by both techniques, a significant new perspective would apply to the relationship between them. Conversely, the failure to locate evidence specifically indicating the use of an eyed needle would largely eliminate any doubt about the Scottish bootees being early exemplars of shepherd’s knitting, as the child’s sock would also be. The question of the latter object’s age would then become pivotal to dating the advent of that craft.

The first description of the putative nalbound Coptic sock was published in 1955, again predating widespread recognition of slip stitch crochet. However, that attribution is echoed in a later report where the alternatives should have been recognized, and which verifies neither the sock’s age nor provenance. I’ll discuss relevant documents in separate posts.

* * *

More information about traditional Scottish cleeking is given in a presentation held by Louise Scollay at the In the Loop at 10 conference at the Winchester School of Art in June 2018, titled Archive Treasure: Cleekit Gloves, with relevant additional commentary in a following panel discussion.