Tag: Techniques

Looped Fabric

A stilted perspective on hooked knitting

Cary Karp5 Comments

The shepherds in Landes, the northernmost part of the French Basque Country, were a subject of popular attention during the 19th century for two traits. One was their use of stilts to deal with the marshy heathlands on which their flocks grazed, and the other was their practice of knitting while watching over them. A chapter on ‘The Shepherds of Les Bas Landes’ in the US publication Forrester’s Pictorial Miscellany from 1855 illustrates how widespread the interest in them had become. An article in the Scientific American Supplement from 26 September 1891 on ‘Stilt Walking’ describes the shepherds’ ambulatory prowess and social circumstance.

Illustrations of them knitting began to proliferate mid-century but rarely focus on its detail. The clearest one I have thus far been able to find is from 1863 (source information here) and shows yarn-around-neck (probably using a shoulder hook), with what may be a small pouch holding the yarn just below the sock that is in progress.

landes-shepherd

The shepherds’ knitting technique is described in Mary Thomas’s Knitting Book from 1938, showing the tools at the outset of the chapter on ‘Knitting Implements Ancient and Modern.’ (The preceding post discusses other aspects of her description of knitting in Landes.)

thomas-hooks

This photo shows an “ancient weatherbeaten knitting pouch” together with “modern…hooked needles…made by a shepherd…from old umbrella ribs…hand filed and shaped as they have always been made” in Landes. It is not clear what ‘ancient’ and ‘always’ actually mean.

Thomas says that hooked needles can be traced back to the Arabic origins of knitting, which applies in equal measure to the needles used in all the other schools of yarn-around-neck knitting discussed in previous posts. There is no evidence of a similarly characteristic shared use of a knitting pouch. It is of obvious utility for work while perched on stilts and, at least the form shown here, may have developed specifically in that context. The pouch is also seen clearly in a photo from the early-20th century, by which time the wetlands had been drained and the need for stilts had ended.

landes-1910

The knitting shepherds are also noted in the Victorian fancywork literature. The introductory remarks about crochet in The industrial handbook containing plain instructions in needlework and knitting, published anonymously in 1853 state:

“This kind of work, which has lately become fashionable under its new name, was formerly called ‘Shepherd’s Knitting.’ It has long been a favourite occupation of this class of persons, particularly in the south of France, where, whilst tending their sheep on the mountains, they fabricate a number of useful and ingenious articles.”

This conflates the knitting of the Landes shepherds, who were approaching the heyday of their international renown, with the traditional slip stitch crochet called “shepherd’s knitting” and described in earlier British texts on crochet as the initial manifestation of that craft.

“Crochet,—a species of knitting originally practised by the peasants in Scotland, with a small hooked needle called a shepherd’s hook…”

That snippet was discussed in greater detail in an earlier post, leading to yet another form of knitting with a hook-tipped needle associated with Scotland, termed Scottish knitting or Tricot éccosais. This was most commonly referred to in the Victorian literature as “tricot” (now generally termed Tunisian crochet) and worked with a “tricot hook.” This gainsays Mary Thomas’s concluding remark about the practice in Landes, that “There appears no trace of hooked needles in Britain…”

More about Bosnian crochet
Looped Fabric

More about Bosnian crochet

Cary Karp1 Comment

The description of Bosnian crochet given by Luise Schinnerer in 1897 and discussed in detail in the preceding post, is echoed in almost all points of detail in the article on crochet in the Encyclopedia of Needlework; New Edition by Thérèse de Dillmont. This work has appeared in numerous editions beginning in 1886 but the first one makes no mention of Bosnian crochet, nor do the first French or German editions. The revised French edition appeared in 1900 (briefly reviewed in the newspaper Le Radical on 31 July 1900) and the various translated versions would not have been released earlier. This left ample time for Dillmont (a native German speaker) to have taken note of Schinnerer’s article in the interim. (The online copy linked to above is of a printing from January 1922, as indicated by the numerical code ‘122’ at the bottom of the page following the title page.)

Linda Ligon reviewed the Dillmont article in the July/August 1994 issue of PieceWork Magazine also noting that there was no mention of Bosnian crochet in the first edition of the Encyclopedia, “so it’s not clear when this special kind of work came to her attention.” I believe the answer to that question is when she found Schinnerer’s description of it.

Beyond illustrating the craft, Dillmont’s text is particularly important because it enters the English term “Bosnian crochet” into the fancywork glossary, defining it according to Schinnerer’s description. However, Dillmont does not retain Schinnerer’s exclusive focus on traditional tools and applications. The shared basic stitch is described in the Encyclopedia as the “single stitch” noting that it “is also known as the slip stitch.”

dillmont-plain-stitch

The work is not turned at the end of a row and the yarn is simply carried a bit beyond the final stitch and cut. When the next row is started, “the thread has to be fastened on afresh, each time.”

Dillmont provides detailed instructions for making a strip of the mixed-color form, working into the back leg of the chain loop of the corresponding stitch in the preceding row (now abbreviated BLO). Schinnerer only says that the same leg of that loop is used without specifying the front (FLO) or the back.

bosnian-multicolor

Another instruction is for the characteristic relief pattern that results from selectively alternating the point where the hook is inserted, from the back leg to the front leg of the loop. Both Schinnerer and Dillmont say this is only done using a single color.

bosian-unicolor

Schinnerer also shows a photo of a hat where the upper closed-work portion is made in this manner (but does not describe the stitch structure of the wide band at the bottom).

bosnian-hat

Her article additionally discusses Bosnian-Herzegovinian knitting with hook-tipped needles, and the regional practice of making fabric with alternating bands of slip stitch crochet and knitting. Although something of a centerpiece for Schinnerer, Dillmont says nothing about it.

One interesting characteristic of the hybrid fabric is that the crocheted portions are made using a special hook and not the hook-tipped knitting needles, despite Dillmont indicating that the latter option would be viable. Her illustration of an ordinary crochet hook being used to produce slip stitches could as easily show the end of a hook-tipped knitting needle. In fact, this ties into an earlier post that I left dangling with the intention of following up much sooner, where a cylindrical crochet hook (found in trade listings up to 35 cm long) is illustrated in use for what may well have been slip stitch crochet.

Nonetheless, traditional slip stitch crochet is often associated with the use of a special hook, not just in the Bosnian school, but in others as well. Various local manifestations have been discussed in several previous posts. The current Swedish tradition uses this form, which can be traced back into the late 18th century.

penelope-flat-hook

It is also described in an early Dutch publication (details here ) and presumably used elsewhere. However, given the clear difference between it and the Bosnian hook shown by Schinnerer, there is no substantive basis for the frequent reference to the Nordic/Dutch form as a Bosnian crochet hook.bosnian-hook

Looped Fabric

Hooked knitting and crochet in Bosnia

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The text by Fritz Iklé discussed in the preceding post summarizes an article “about Bosnian-Herzegovinian knitting” by Luise Schinnerer published in the 1897 volume of the Zeitschrift für österreichische Volkskunst (Journal of Austrian Folk Art). He doesn’t indicate its title and focuses on her observations about knitting with hook-tipped needles being a practice of the Islamic community in Bosnia and Herzegovina (and adjacent regions). He ties this into the established belief that knitting originated in Egypt, noting that it was not the “ancient Egyptians” but later “Arabic tribes” who devised it.

Luise Schinnerer (b. 1854, still active in 1915, also publishing as Louise) was a teacher at the Royal School for Artistic Embroidery (k. k. Fachschule für Kunststickerei) in Vienna and is now best known for her technical analysis of nalbinding. This was the first detailed text on the subject and appeared in a booklet she published in 1895 titled Antike Handarbeiten (Antique Handicrafts). It includes photographs of a nalbound Coptic sock and a reproduction she made of it (exhibited publicly in 1893 and 1894, receiving awards on both occasions) together with drawings of how the stitch structure was produced.

The text recognizes the structural difference between nalbound cross-knit looping (illustrated with a fragment of another sock) and laterally interconnected compound nalbinding (as in the sock she reproduced). However, Schinnerer regards the cross-knit fabric as twisted-stitch knitting — a technique she says was known in Egypt by some time during the interval 6th–4th century BCE. She further says that it was practiced in parallel with nalbinding subsequent to the emergence of the latter in the Coptic period or perhaps somewhat earlier, and distinguishes between the two ways of making socks as Strumpfstrickerei and Strumpfnäheri (“stocking knitting” and “stocking sewing”).

Schinnerer apparently based her belief about the antiquity of knitting on a cited feature article in the Neue Freie Presse (New Free Press) from 1882 titled Altegyptische Textilkunst (Ancient Egyptian Textile Art), written by the founder of the Royal School for Artistic Embroidery, Emilie Bach (b. 1840) and discussed further with a translation here. Schinnerer adds her own observations in the article referred to by Iklé, the full title of which is Einiges über die bosnisch-herzegowenischen Strick- und Häkelarbeiten (Something about the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Knitted and Crocheted Works). This covers recent practice and her informants include the National Government of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the National Museum, and the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Bureau for Domestic and Applied Arts in Vienna.

The article provides fundamental descriptions not just of knitting with hooked needles, but of an indigenous form of slip stitch crochet as well. It also illustrates fabric that includes knitting and crochet side by side. A photograph of a partially finished sock can be directly compared with the one from Turkey shown in Iklé’s article.

bosnian-slipper-sock

In contrast to the open-stitch knitting he illustrates, Schinnerer’s photograph is intended to show a twisted-stitch structure, again demonstrating that there is no geographic basis for categorizing the two forms of knit stitch as Western and Eastern.

Schinnerer illustrates the tool used for crochet, which fits into a sequence of drawings of specialized hooks for slip stitch crochet that began to appear over a century earlier, when the craft was first documented — attested in English texts beginning in 1812 as “shepherd’s knitting.”

bosnian-hook

The earlier illustrations clearly show hooks with flat cross sections and tapered shafts. Even if not apparent from this drawing, it can safely be assumed that the Bosnian hook was similarly shaped, not least in light of Schinnerer remarking that “mass-produced commercially-available crochet hooks are unsuited” for such work.

Schinnerer further characterizes Bosnian crochet by two decorative techniques. One is a raised pattern made by selectively working slip stitches into the front and back legs of the chain loops of the corresponding stitches in the preceding row. (These are detailed in the following post.) This contradicts the more recent assertion that Bosnian crochet differs from other forms of slip stitch crochet in that new stitches are consistently worked into the back legs of the loops of the stitches to which they are anchored.

Such decoration is only applied to work that is crocheted throughout. It does not appear in fabric consisting of alternating bands of knitting and crochet, which Schinnerer illustrates with another sock and a mitten. The second decorative technique forms a pattern by the alternating use of yarn with different colors, worked consistently into the same leg of the anchor loop. She neither says which leg that is nor that there was a general preference.

Schinnerer notes that the abutting knitted and crocheted structures are made respectively with hooked knitting needles and the specialized crochet hook, again indicating a significant difference between the shapes of the two implements where the stitches are formed. The possibility of these tools having arrived on the Bosnian workbench via separate paths therefore deserves further examination.

Looped Fabric

Hook-tipped knitting needles and their traveling companions

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The preceding post discussed hook-tipped knitting needles and the reasons why they are thought to be older than smooth-tipped ones. The schools of knitting in which they are used are further characterized by a method of holding the yarn that is generically termed “yarn around neck.” This is believed to resemble the form of knitting initially transmitted from Islamic Egypt more closely than any other. An early description of it appears below and its most extensively documented form is now widely known as Portuguese knitting.

The only structural detail that might differentiate fabric knitted around the neck from that produced by other methods is too subtle to be measured, much less recognized in older material. The physical evidence that specifically indicates the method is an ancillary mechanical device used in a limited number of schools and unlikely to be recognized as such in an inventory of archaeologically recovered artifacts. (This is the chest ring in the description below and seen in the video linked to above)

Nonetheless, the geographic distribution of yarn-around-neck knitting coincides well enough with that of hooked needles for it to be likely that the tool and method accompanied each other along whatever transmission paths they may have traversed. (Twisted stitches are often regarded as an additional fellow traveler but they are readily made by other methods of knitting and are specific to none. Their occurrence is not geographically bounded, notwithstanding the popular designation “Eastern knitting” which I’ll discuss in the next post.)

I examined early texts about hooked knitting needles in two previous posts regarding the precursors of Tunisian crochet and am now going to revisit the source documents with specific focus on knitting.

In brief review, the first written description of hooked needles in hand knitting that I’ve so far managed to locate is of their introduction in Hannover, Germany, in 1787 (source reference and translation here). This is corroborated in a more detailed text from 1800 by J. F. Netto and F. L. Lehmann (whose book on knitting is detailed here). This associates it specifically with knitting in the round using five needles, with a separate section describing how a named Swiss knitter worked flat with two needles using a fixed-needle technique (translated and explained via the preceding link). This description overlaps almost entirely with that of Portuguese knitting, which traditionally uses a shoulder ring and hook-tipped needles, although smooth-tipped needles are also commonly employed.

Fourteenth Chapter

Knitting purses … with needles and hooks

§34

“Dübois knit the purse with heavy knitting needles into the one end of which a space had been filed forming a small hook like a tambour needle. He had a ball of silk thread in his vest pocket. On the left side of his chest there was a horn ring with a hook attached, through which the working thread passed. The hooked needle was thus used to pull a new loop through the previous one more quickly than usual. He kept the thread under light pressure with his left arm. The thread passing through the ring was therefore under slight tension, largely accounting for, first, the rapidity of his knitting, and second the beauty and evenness of his stitches.”

Recent texts that discuss differences in the working properties of knitting needles with smooth and hooked tips generally conclude that nothing can be done with the one that cannot be done with the other, but that hooked tips can do certain things more efficiently. One example of this is the economy of motion and material resulting from the ability of a hook to pull a new loop through a preexisting stitch without first wrapping the yarn around the needle.

A further difference is not immediately apparent when the comparison is made from the perspective of mainstream contemporary knitting. An unworked stitch can be slipped from one hooked needle to the other and knitted with the receiving needle alone by pulling a loop through it crochet style. In any case, it has the advantage Netto lists in the section on flat knitting that “stitches will not as easily be dropped or slip off in the process.”

Yarn-around-neck knitting also has an important property that lacks counterpart in any other method. It leads the yarn to the front of the work, making the purl stitch simpler to form than the knit one. Fabric now produced in this manner is ordinarily held with the purl side facing the knitter. Tubular knitting intended to show ordinary stocking stitch on the public side is worked inside out and the finished item then re-inverted.

There is no way to trace that practice back to its origin. Nonetheless, if yarn-around-neck knitting is accepted as an attribute of Coptic tubular knitting, or even if the trail begins with knitting in the form initially carried into Islamic Europe, purling would be far older than is currently believed.

Looped Fabric

More about the structure of early Egyptian knitting

Cary Karp5 Comments

A previous post discussed several pieces of tubular knitting reported to have been made in Egypt during the 1st millennium CE. (Thanks to Matthew Pius for spotting the earlier studies and guest blogging their central details, summarized and commented on below.) One of the tubes had been radiocarbon dated to the interval 425–594 CE (in this test report) and is thus the oldest such object of substantiated age that has yet come to light. It is described by Dominique Bénazeth in an article titled “Accessoires vestimentaires dans la collection de textiles coptes du musée du Louvre” in a report from a conference in 2009, published in 2013 as Drawing the threads together; Dress accessories of the 1st millennium AD from Egypt.

The direct indications of this item having been made in Egypt are too weak to establish its provenance. However, its similarity to other knitted tubes that have a better-established Egyptian nexus — particularly one that is currently at the Museum of Byzantine Art in Berlin — was accepted as sufficient for grouping the Louvre piece with them. The Berlin tube is not clearly dated but is of certain geographic provenance and has been examined in greater structural detail. A report about it appears in an exhibition catalog from 2010 prepared by Klaus Finneiser, Petra Linscheid, and Meliné Pehlivanian, titled Georg Schweinfurth; Pionier der Textilforschung und Afrikaforscher. Their structural analysis concluded that it was likely to have been knitted on a peg loom, which is generally an efficient production device for tubular knitting. Since the Paris tube is both longer and narrower, the same method of production was assumed for it, as well.

The fabric structure of the Berlin tube is what a present-day knitter would call open (or uncrossed or untwisted) stocking stitch, albeit in a compound variant where each stitch is worked over the corresponding stitches in both of the two preceding courses (discussed and illustrated here). Loom knitters call this 1-over-2 (or double stitch) knitting. Its twisted “e-wrap” form commonly appears in stitch dictionaries of loom knitting, but descriptions of an open 1-over-2 structure produced with open “u-wrap” or “true” knitted stitches do not.

Compound knitting isn’t found in the established glossary of contemporary needle knitting but the structure appears in single-wale “false seams” worked with a crochet hook, such as Elizabeth Zimmerman’s phony seam (alternating 1-over-2 and 2-over-1). However, there is no particular difficulty in making compound stitches with ordinary knitting needles that justifies, much less necessitates, positing the greater utility of a knitting loom. There is no unequivocal physical or iconographic evidence of any of the candidate implements until significantly later than the production date of the Paris tube. There is also some basis for adding a circular needle to the speculative list of applicable tools.

An illustrated description of the needle-based technique was published in 1997 in a catalog prepared by Marianne Erikson titled Textiles in Egypt 200–1500 AD. It is part of the analysis of a fragment from ca. 1000 CE presented as flatwork but plausibly a segment of a piece worked in the round. That method of compound knitting was considered in further detail in a series of tutorial blog posts by Katrin Kania, in turn based on a workshop conducted by Petra Linscheid that examined the spool-based approach. A book recently published by Assia Brill titled Distitch, describes several needle-based techniques from the perspective of their contemporary application.

The photograph included in the Berlin report shows the compound structure from both the front and back of the fabric. The tube is not intact and several courses can be seen from the inside. The photograph in the report on the piece at the Louvre shows similar damage and reveals additional structural detail that might otherwise go unnoticed. Both tubes display the notable vertical compression of the individual stitches that is typical of compound knitting.

However, the second yellow band from the left in the lower segment in the following photo of the Paris tube has several stitches that are strained open and appear as though they might be looped into the immediately adjacent course only. The entire piece is close to two meters long and the full published photograph shows it in a serpentine position. The fineness of the stitching can be understood by visualizing the segments shown here as parts of a continuous tube of such length. If it is accepted that mistakes in this form of compound knitting can appear as ordinary knit stitches, there is no need for further explanation of the deviation in the lower segment.

af6027-detail
© 2010 Musée du Louvre / Georges Poncet

The Berlin report references additional examples of Coptic tubular knitting and other sources include still more. Both simple and compound stocking stitch are represented and the detailed examination of a larger number of samples would permit a more certain determination of the balance between the two types. Some of the tubes are also closed at one end either with a drawstring or decreases in the final few rounds of stitches. The analysis of those structures might also provide more specific detail about the technique(s) applied to their production.

Looped Fabric

Methods for looping wire

Cary Karp6 Comments

Instructions for knitting tubes of thin metal wire on a small peg loom were published in 1822 in the Dutch periodical Penélopé. They describe a technique that is referred to in instructions for a loom-knitted purse that appeared in an 1823 issue of the same publication.

I’ll translate the wirework instructions extensively in a separate post but will note for now that they are for twisted-stitch knitting. There is no reference to the open-stitch alternative that appears in the later purse instructions, but those do say that the technique (currently termed flat stitching) works best with “gold or silver thread.” Such metallic thread was made by wrapping a thin ribbon of metal spirally around a core of silk thread. This had the appearance of metal but with the tensile properties of silk thread, and flexibility largely determined by the core.

The earlier wirework instructions also illustrate the pegged end of what appears to be a narrow cylindrical loom, specifically for making chains in fine gold wire. The technique described in 1822 remains in common practice and an array of tutorial videos can be found by searching on “spool knitting with wire” (using a common designation for a small peg loom). These show some variation in spool shapes and the way stitches are formed on them.

Having just conducted that exercise to make sure that it gives the intended result, I did find flat-stitching among the illustrated techniques, but also noted that it was knitted far more loosely than any of the Viking work discussed thus far. This doesn’t quite eliminate my concern about the potential risk of silver wire being damaged by the high intrinsic strain of open-stitch knitting on a peg loom, but it clearly does demonstrate the viability of at least looser forms of such work. The safest way to deal with this is by stipulating that a skilled loom worker can also knit wire into tighter open-stitch structures (but still reserving judgment about whether that extends to compound knitting).

The videos illustrate two ways of using a spool. In addition to lifting the stitches off the pegs into the hollow inside of the spool, it is also possible to form a wire tube along the outside of a cylindrical spool. The pegs then only serve as an initial anchor for the work, which is subsequently detached from them. The spool is repositioned along the tube as its length increases, to ensure that it maintains a consistent diameter.

The fundamental difference between the conventional use of a peg loom and that of an enclosed spool is that a fixed length of wire is worked around the latter by inserting its leading end into every successive stitch, and pulling the entire length of the working wire through it. This results in a twisted-stitch structure that is properly classified as looping, not knitting. Nonetheless, one name commonly given to such work is “Viking knitting.” Whatever significance the distinction between looping and knitting may have to the practitioners of these crafts, if any, it is fundamental to dating the advent of the latter technology.

An earlier set of instructions for looping wire without a supporting device appears in an issue of Penélopé from 1821. As with the invisible spool knitting seen in the preceding post, wire can be cross-knit looped into carefully controlled shapes without need for a support. Dramatic illustrations of this are seen in the work of Ruth Asawa, as here, here, and here.

Objects made with the same basic technique, albeit on a far smaller scale, were found in graves at the Viking settlement at Birka, active from the 8th through the 10th centuries CE near present-day Stockholm. This photo shows a fragment of one such piece.

birka-2

Another illustrates the compound structure that appears in many of the objects previously discussed here.

birka-1

They are described by Agnes Geijer in a chapter on embroidery in the site documentation from 1938. This identifies six variants of cross-knit looping, four of which are illustrated with a needle pulling metal thread through an implied cloth support. Each of the other two variants is described as a length of wire worked into a simple or compound cross-knit structure by pulling its free end through each loop.

birka-3

One of the important points Geijer makes is that archaeologically recovered wirework which appears to have been made to stand alone can initially have been worked into a textile support that has subsequently decayed. She does not discuss the possibility of objects with a cross-knit structure made free from a substrate being fashioned in any manner other than by looping. Nonetheless, it is clear from the open-stitch stockinette chains seen in previous posts — a structure that cannot be made by looping — that both knitting and looping were practiced by Viking wire workers.

 

Looped Fabric

Methods for knitting metal tubes

Cary Karp1 Comment

Tubular open-stitch knitting of the previously described type is a common find at Viking sites. This discussion began with it because there is little question about it being stocking stitch in the present-day Western sense, albeit with a compound structure. Comparable specimens with twisted stitches have also been found, as has the cross-knit looping that can often be difficult to distinguish from it.

Correctly differentiating the knitted and looped forms is not eased by their often being conflated in the literature of the modern craft known as “Viking knitting.” Despite calling this technique knitting, it is straightforward cross-knit looping. The underlying issue is that twisted-stitch knitting and cross-knit looping share the same basic structure. An archaeologically-recovered metal tube made in either manner may not reveal the secondary structural detail needed to tell them apart, especially if only a fragment remains. Other indications of the production method might also help but we lack specific knowledge of the techniques used by the Vikings to make any such wirework. It is possible nonetheless, to test the suitability of more recent methods and list conceivable options.

The post linked to above cites a remark by Richard Rutt about the equivalent Irish tubular knitting: “…the Celtic work was done with a knitting nancy. Complex knitting is much easier on a knitting nancy than it is on knitting needles.” (A knitting nancy is a small peg loom, also called a knitting spool.) This judgment would be entirely correct for work with yarn and is consistent with what other authors have suggested about the use of a peg loom for the Egyptian knitted tubes. However, metal has a number of mechanical properties that yarn does not. It is vulnerable to kinks and dents, breaking easily at either, and hardens when worked. All of the methods for open-loop knitting on a peg loom put the stitches under significant tension, as does compound knitting. This can become critical with wire, particularly at small diameters. The method that strains it the least, minimizes the risk of damage.

The stitches on a peg loom are commonly worked with a hook. Although a peg loom can be used for knitting both yarn and wire, a hook alone is adequate for the latter. Wire is rigid enough for a loop formed of it not to require mechanical support pending its being secured to another loop. The process is illustrated in this video where it is named for the tool, but the parent website also uses the more analytical designation “Invisible Spool Knitting” — ISK.

This basic technique will be familiar to any knitter who has repaired dropped stitches by re-knitting them vertically with a crochet hook. It is easy enough to see how it can also produce a twisted-stitch structure simply by rotating each loop 180° after it is pulled through the corresponding loop in the previous row. If one similarly envisions a loop of the one color wire being drawn over the loop of the other color in the next row, and then secured to the loop of its own color in the row after that, the result is compound knitting. (The strip of 8th-century Irish flat knitting shown in the preceding post displays precisely such a two-colored compound structure.)

The drawplate is another important implement specific to wirework. It allows a tube to be knitted at a comfortably large diameter which is then reduced to whatever is desired for the finished tube. This means, at least in principle, that knitting needles can be used to form a looser version of the same structure, which is then drawn down to size — but also elongated in the doing. Ensuring adequately dense stitching in the final tube is one of the effects of compound knitting. It also appears for that purpose in the tutorial literature of modern Viking knitting as double knitting, with triple knitting also described.

Again, though, none of this establishes how the Viking and Irish tubes were actually knitted. Nonetheless, of all the plausible alternatives, using a hook in the manner shown in the video affords the greatest economy of motion and subjects the wire to the least stress. Minimizing the number of contact points that can potentially injure the surface of the wire might similarly explain a preference for an open-loop structure.

Looped Fabric

Nalbound mittens in 1917

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The 1917 volume of the Swedish periodical Fataburen includes an article by Maria Collin titled Sydda vantar. This literally means ‘stitched mittens’ and is an inversion of the term vantsöm (mitten stitch) seen in preceding posts. She discusses alternate designations at length, including a dialectal reference to a mitten that was “bound with a needle or needlebound” (bunnen med nål eller nålbönnen).

The article was a watershed both for research into regional forms of nalbinding and the practical description of the underlying technique. Mittens provide the point of entry into the discussion but it extends to other items that were traditionally nalbound. Collin’s approach to relaying information provided by tradition-bearing practitioners and then turning it into illustrated instructions, has been applied by almost all subsequent writers on the subject in Sweden.

Collin begins by reporting the first time she saw nalbound mittens, shown to her in Värmland as an example of a characteristic old craft of that province. (She was born in 1864 but does not say when the encounter took place.) She asked how the mittens were made and was told:

“They are called needled [nålade] mittens and it is old women who make them. They sew them on their thumbs but do not want to teach the art.”

Collin got no further in obtaining the desired information until a regional handicraft exhibition in Uppsala, in December 1915. Many exhibitors displayed what the catalog listed as stitched mittens (sömvantar or sömmade vantar), and she was taught how to make them. Despite the way the mittens were named in the catalog, she said that the makers spoke about them as påtade (a term that lacks a direct English equivalent, explained below). That word also appears in the introduction to the catalog with the parenthetical clarification that the designated technique is also called stitching, in precisely the same sense as in the title of Collin’s article.

The word påta (which may be a cognate of the English ‘putter’) has otherwise been broadly applied to various crafts over time. In the context of mitten making in 1915 it would normally be taken to designate slip stitch crochet made on a flat hook. (It retains that meaning but is also frequently applied to making i-cord on a small knitting dolly.) In fact, the catalog lists a number of påtade mittens, raising an interesting question about whether they were sömmade and the name was simply not normalized, or if some were slip stitch crocheted on a flat hook notwithstanding the introductory remark.

In the next post, I’ll provide more information about the overlap in the use of påta to name the structurally and technically different crafts of nalbinding and slip stitch crochet.

Looped Fabric

The long hook in 1800

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It’s been a while since the last post and I’m uncertain about where best to resume the discussion. My initial intention had been to focus next on early descriptions of flat hooks used for shepherd’s knitting (now also referred to as simple slip stitch crochet). Material and written evidence of this begins to appear in the 1780s, but a key text from 1800 also extends the discussion of the hooked knitting needles used by the Swiss knitter Dubois, introduced in the preceding post — so let’s start with that.

Johann Friedrich Netto was a drawing teacher from Leipzig who wrote several tutorial books on textile and needle crafts in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He appears to have been an experienced practitioner of many of the described techniques and his pedagogical background is reflected throughout. In 1800, together with Friedrich Leonhard Lehmann, he published Die Kunst zu stricken in ihrem ganzen Umfange (“The art of knitting in its full extent”).

This is generally regarded as the first narrative book about hand knitting but it also provides early descriptions of several other crafts (as they are now classified; Netto regarded them all as forms of knitting). I’ll be providing full translations of a number of these instructions in later posts, including all that discuss the techniques Netto ascribes to Dubois. I’m taking the first such translation out of the original order because it may suggest that Dubois did not use hooked needles solely as a quicker way to form conventional knit stitches, but also produced stitches on them that cannot be formed on smooth-tipped needles.

In the section below, Netto describes Dubois’s method as the form of fixed-needle knitting that is often termed pit knitting, albeit with the needle held under the left arm rather than in the more common position at the right side. In another section (§34, translated in a separate post) Netto repeats and expands the text from 1787, describing how Dubois worked in the round with the variety of yarn-around-neck knitting that uses a shoulder pin.

Fourteenth Chapter

Knitting the largest man’s stocking in an hour using the method taught by Dubois

§62

More than once in the company of several ladies, Dubois knitted a stocking from beginning to end in one hour. The yarn that he used in these cases was admittedly of the heaviest sort. As noted above, a small hook was filed into the one end of his knitting needles, through which he pulled the yarn with the greatest speed and completed a row of stitches in a moment. He held [one of] the long heavy needles against his left side raised with the stocking on it, and knitted close to his index finger, over which the working yarn was held ready. Without looking closely at it, he wrapped the yarn around the hook with his index finger and pulled, or rather lifted, it quickly over the tip of the needle held at his side to form the stitch.

This knitting, in which one holds the needles at the side, has now become fairly common in Berlin, Dresden, and Hannover. Even with regular knitting needles without the hooks one can knit far more rapidly in this manner, finishing three stockings in the time it takes to make two by moving both needles. Knitting done by Dubois’s method is additionally far more elastic and has a much more beautiful appearance; also stitches will not as easily be dropped or slip off in the process. In short, the effort needed to get started with it will be richly rewarded in the end, when one has acquired a certain degree of proficiency with it.

Looped Fabric

The long hook in 1787

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A previous post considered documents from 1858 that describe a long crochet hook and the craft for which it was used. The authors, together with others writing about the same craft during the following years, differed in opinion about whether it was a form of crochet or constituted a craft of its own. The first of the names published for it by those in the latter camp was Crochet à la tricoter. The most straightforward of the many alternate designations that were soon to appear were “tricot crochet” or simply “tricot.” When treated as a form of crochet, the generic distinction was between “ordinary crochet” and “long-hook crochet.”

Texts regarding that craft as distinct from crochet and knitting either describe it as displaying properties of both or simply treat the three as peers without comment, as in instructions in 1859 for a pattern suitable for “knitting, tricot, or crochet.” The most common present-day designation for long-hook crochet is “Tunisian crochet,” which is still regularly presented as a fusion of crochet and knitting.

In structural terms, fabric produced in that manner consists of alternating rows of knit-type interlooping and crochet-type interlooping and can therefore not be categorized as either. In procedural terms, however, the use of a long hook to pull one loop through another doesn’t differ from the use of an ordinary crochet hook for the same action. From that perspective, it is reasonable to regard the knit/crochet hybrid as a variant form of crochet.

The long hook itself was most commonly called a “tricot needle” or “tricot hook.” It was effectively identical to a hooked knitting needle, with which it was frequently compared. A text written in 1859 provides instructions for converting a pointed knitting needle into a tricot hook. Additional documents support the conclusion that a hooked implement of that form could as easily have been employed in knitting as for tricot.

Hooked needles have been used for knitting in many regions for longer than has yet been (or likely even can be) determined. Perhaps the most extensively documented contemporary practice is “Portuguese knitting,” which is also characterized by leading the yarn through a ring fastened near the collar to control its tension. An early description of this technique appears in the chapter on “stocking knitting” in the 1787 edition of Johann Beckmann’s Anleitung zur Technologie, oder zur Kentniss der Handwerke, Fabriken und Manufacturen (“Technological Guide to Handicrafts, Industries, and Manufacture”; this is primarily focused on machine knitting but despite explicitly excluding hand knitting from its scope, it did add this one section to the text as it appeared in the 1777 edition.)

It presents the work of a virtuoso Swiss knitter who appears again in a German text from 1800. The latter work goes into greater detail about his use of hooked knitting needles in pairs, mentioning at least one form of stitching that could not be produced on pointed needles. (This and the other documents mentioned summarily here will be covered in greater detail in separate posts.) Here is the initial presentation from 1787.

In 1778 in Hannover, a Swiss national named Dubois taught an improved method that he had devised for knitting with needles. He charged one thaler for an hourlong lesson and in 12 hours many were able to learn that art. The improvement consisted of each needle having a small hook at its one end, which allowed every stitch to be pulled off as soon as it was formed, making the work quicker and easier. The thread from the ball passed through a small ring that was pinned to the left side of the chest.