More about Bosnian crochet

31 March 201822 November 2021 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.”

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Looped Fabric

Hook-tipped knitting needles and their traveling companions

17 February 20185 February 2023 Cary KarpLeave a comment

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

Early knitting with hook-tipped needles

9 February 201822 November 2021 Cary Karp1 Comment

Texts about knitting often present needles with hooked tips as limited regional preferences to the commonplace smooth-tipped needles. The hooked form is considered to be the older of the two and initially used in Egypt where the craft is also believed to have originated. Such needles have been documented in Eastern Europe, Portugal, and Southern France — all on or near routes along which knitting would have been carried into Europe from Egypt before diffusing more widely.

One problem with taking this as an indication of hook-tipped needles in prior Egyptian practice is that the presumed origin of knitting there and the more recently observed distribution of hook-tipped needles, are circularly taken to provide evidence of each other. Another problem is that there is no way to determine if the local European hooked-needle traditions all date back to the period when the Egyptian technology would have been transferred, or if they reflect later intra-European cultural exchange or even independent development. (This becomes particularly interesting when considering the relationship between the knitting carried to South America by Iberian colonialists and the indigenous looping traditions, which were often of breathtaking intricacy, in practice before European contact.)

Needles with smooth tips were illustrated in European portraits of “Knitting Madonnas” not all that long after the craft would have arrived in the locations where the paintings were made. The earliest is Italian from ca. 1345. Perhaps the best known of the genre, and certainly the one with the clearest detail, appears on the Buxtehude Altar from ca. 1400. (A set of five needles is shown in an illustration of a sock being knitted from ca. 1450.)

This either gainsays the northward importation (or at least its dating) or indicates that the hooks were dropped in rapid order thereafter — assuming that they were present in the first place. Assessing this also requires account to be taken of the Celtic and Viking knitting in wire prior to the putative arrival of knitting with non-rigid fibers via southern Europe.

It is also often suggested that the first device used for narrow tubular knitting in Egypt was a peg loom. This is based on the relative ease with which such implements can be used to knit all of the stitch structures seen in extant material, with a single hook. If that is accepted as correct, it could then be posited that needle knitting was spawned by the realization that a number of identical hooks could be used in a manner that obviated need for the loom. However, it could be suggested conversely that loom knitting is the younger technique, devised to provide a more easily mastered alternative to multi-needle knitting, also reducing the battery of needles — whether smooth or hook tipped — to a single hook.

There is no conclusive way of determining if loom knitting and needle knitting appeared sequentially in the same lineage or developed independently, perhaps even before either was introduced into Coptic Egypt. Nor is there any reason to assume that both methods were practiced there. Turning the perspective instead to structural detail, the simple and compound open stocking stitch observed in early tubular knitting can be characterized by the parallel chains that are formed at right angles to the path of the yarn as each row is worked into the preceding one.

Such chains also appear in the significantly older plaited fabric widely termed sprang, which is worked in two symmetrical halves toward a central “meeting line.” If this is retained in the final object (which is otherwise split into separate halves), it is secured by one of several methods that include looping a row of chains across the fabric. The plaiting is normally done with bare hands but the room for maneuvering decreases as the two halves approach each other, and the chained form of the meeting line is therefore made with a hook. (I’ll revisit this all in greater historical and technical detail in separate posts and, as sprang is a Swedish word, will also examine relevant documents in which it appears.)

Here is a detail of the simple chain meeting line in the oldest known exemplar of sprang — a cap found in a Danish grave from ca. 1300 BCE,

and another of a compound chain meeting line in a hairnet found at a Danish site from ca. 490 BCE.

Chains also appear in multiple adjacent rows at meeting lines and as decorative ridges in other positions. This structure is properly classified as knitting-type interlooping and is an element of sprang even if not primarily identified with it. As with the early contemporaneous manifestations of remarkably similar forms of needle binding and tubular knitting in Northern Europe and Egypt, sprang also appears in both regions. (Extensive additional material about Nordic and Coptic sprang are found in the monumental Ancient Danish Textiles from Bogs and Burials by Margrethe Hald, who we met in an earlier post about nalbinding and whose illustrations of meeting lines appear above.)

Coptic sprang survives from the 4th century CE and the craft was practiced in Egypt through and beyond the entire period during which knitting developed there. It thus seems reasonable at least to wonder if the simple and compound knitted structures found in sprang, and their production with a hooked needle, provided impetus to the development of true knitting as initially seen in the tubular pieces that began to appear during the 5th century CE.

Looped Fabric

More about the structure of early Egyptian knitting

19 December 20173 February 2023 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

Crochet isn’t for the birds

25 November 201722 November 2021 Cary KarpLeave a comment

Hooks and needles have been around immeasurably longer than any evidence of either being used in the production of looped fabric, and looping without tools all but certainly predates the use of any such implements for that craft. In fact, there’s no way even to determine if our species was the first to figure out how to do any of this.

Tailorbirds know how to draw loose fiber into thread and sew with it.

Weaverbirds know how to gather uniform strips of vegetable fiber and loop and weave them into shaped structures.

A slender pointed beak that can both pierce and grasp is remarkably well suited to the sewing and looping seen here. It is also useful for converting a needle into a hook when needed.

From the perspective of sewing-tool design, the dual-purpose awl and tweezers provided by a beak is a more precise implement than the functionally equivalent index finger and opposable thumb on a human hand. There is no reason to assume that these birds developed their needlecraft and toolmaking skills before we started doing similar things but Homo sapiens can’t even claim credit for the oldest known eyed needle.

It’s a fair guess that this needle was used to pierce fabric and pull some kind of fiber through the resulting hole but that doesn’t preclude similar action at the site of the needle’s manufacture or elsewhere with other tools. It would be more of a stretch to see the needle as evidence of tool-based looping but at some point eyed needles clearly did come into use for that purpose.

There is an obvious upshot to all this. Just as there are several basic looped structures that can readily be made without tools and are seen as universal constructs, appearing independently at uncountable times and places, a battery of ubiquitous tools has been available throughout to ease and extend the production and design of looped fabric. However much local applications might diverge and whatever degree of specialized complexity a craft might ultimately acquire, at least in principle, all can be traced back to one or more elements of the same initial set of structures and tools.

In the largest number of cases, the appearance of similar techniques at widely separated times and locations is therefore best treated as coincidental. However, there are situations where corroborating evidence indicates cultural cross-pollination, if not the outright transfer of technology. One possible such occurrence can be seen in previous posts about the parallels between Egyptian yarncraft and Viking wirecraft, with tubular knitting appearing in each. A similar parallel is found in the looped yarncraft of the two regions.

The eyed needle was used by both communities when working with yarn but the only evidence of a hook used with that material is Egyptian, assuming the practice of knitting on a peg loom. The Vikings similarly appear likely to have used a hook for knitting wire but, again, there is no indication of their having used such tools to work yarn. That technique does appear in Northern Europe far later as “shepherd’s knitting” (the basic form of what is now called slip stitch crochet), where it is believed to have developed over an indeterminate period for producing the types of warm utilitarian garments that were also made in the same region by nalbinding.

However, there is at least one instance of shepherd’s knitting in archaeologically recovered material claimed to be from Coptic Egypt. If that provenance is accepted, it raises a few interesting questions. It is entirely possible that the object is simply an isolated occurrence of a fairly obvious method of looping that would become commonplace at a significantly later date, both in North Africa and Northern Europe. On the other hand, if the parallels between the looping techniques in those two regions are a result of cultural interaction — of which there is otherwise ample evidence — it may be possible that the use of a hook to make crochet-type structures was communicated via those channels. I’ll get into the details of this by describing the Coptic object in a subsequent post.

Looped Fabric

The double-ended tricot hook

7 June 201722 November 2021 Cary Karp2 Comments

The long cylindrical hook normally associated with Tunisian crochet doesn’t differ physically from a hook-tipped knitting needle. The past few posts have considered evidence of that tool having been co-opted for some form of crochet before the first descriptions of Tunisian stitches were published. In contrast, the double-ended hook appears to have been taken into the yarnworker’s toolkit specifically for Tunisian crochet, if not devised outright for it. (This is not the same implement as an ordinary crochet hook with different-sized heads at either end of a shorter, often contoured shaft.)

The first mention I’ve thus far located of a double-ended tricot hook is in an instruction for an “Infant’s Afghan” published in 1904 by Anna Schumacker in the 5th edition of The Columbia Book of the Use of Yarns. It is made with a “Fancy Tricot Stitch” requiring a “Wooden Double End Crochet Hook, 20 in., No. 13.” The stitch is described in relation to an “afghan stitch” illustrated under the heading “Fancy Stitches in Crocheting” but worked in what is recursively termed “tricot style.” This is now widely called the Tunisian Simple Stitch and the fancy version is similarly well known as the form of TSS produced with a double-ended hook.

The 1st edition of the Columbia Book was published in 1901 but I haven’t located a copy and don’t know if the same instruction appeared in it. Nonetheless, if double-ended tricot hooks were available in a range of lengths and gauges in 1904 and prescribed without any indication of their being either difficult to obtain or in any way novel, it seems certain they had been in use for a while prior to that date. This suggests, in turn, either that earlier descriptions remain to be located or that crocheted fabric requiring a double-ended hook was being produced for an indeterminate period before appearing in the fancywork literature. (NOTE: I have since found an earlier reference and described it in a subsequent post.)

The Columbia Book was expanded more or less annually. The 8th edition was released in 1907 and includes the same instruction for an infant’s afghan. The only difference is that the fancy tricot stitch is called a double-hook afghan stitch. It is described in additional detail, together with an illustration of a double hook in a separate section on “Detail Stitches of Afghans” that includes both ordinary and long-hook crochet stitches.

The 8th edition includes a second instruction using the double hook (which may also be in the 6th or 7th eds., that I haven’t examined, either). This is for a “Men’s Golf Vest” using both the basic afghan stitch and the double-hook afghan stitch, worked on a “bone crochet hook, 12-inch, No. 6” and a “double-ended crochet hook, 12-inch, No. 7” respectively. (Some authors make a clear distinction between tricot hooks and crochet hooks, but Schumacker is not among them.)

Skipping over another sequence of revisions, the 17th ed. published in 1916, makes no mention of the double ended hook. However, it does appear in the 19th ed. from 1918, used to produce one of a number of “Detail Stitches of Afghans.” This “Double Hook Afghan Stitch” is not presented as being in any way noteworthy. It is identical to the “fancy tricot stitch” published in 1904 and had apparently moved toward a more central position in the repertoire of crochet stitches in the interim.

Other instructions in the earlier editions of the Columbia Book still call the basic long-hook stitch a tricot stitch but do not invariably prescribe a long hook for it, sometimes calling for a “crochet hook” and leaving its length to individual preference. The inverse situation also applies and ordinary crochet stitches are illustrated on far longer hooks than they intrinsically require. This may be for the sake of pedagogical clarity rather than describing everyday practice. However, as noted in the preceding post and will be further exemplified in a coming one, an illustration of someone using a long hook does not conclusively demonstrate that they are engaged in Tunisian crochet.

Looped Fabric

A Scottish knitter

16 May 201722 November 2021 Cary Karp2 Comments

In her book Tricot Crochet, Rebecca Jones presents a drawing of a woman using what appears to be a single knitting needle to work yarn into fabric. This would require the needle to have a hooked tip but no structural details of the fabric are visible. She got it from the Loch Ness Visitor Centre in Drumnadrochit, Scotland without information about its origin beyond being told that it depicted the 1st Duchess of Sutherland, Elizabeth Sutherland Leveson-Gower (24 May 1765 – 29 January 1839):

Jones notes that the drawing would obviously have been made before the Duchess’s death in 1839, thus providing evidence of what she presumed to be tricot crochet being known and practiced earlier in the 19th century. This dating, as well as the Scottish nexus of the drawing, hinge on the correct identification of its subject. Fortunately, this can be corroborated by an oil portrait of the Duchess painted by Nathaniel Dance-Holland, who died in 1811 and did his last work in the 1790s. She is noticeably younger in the portrait but her facial features are concordant in both images:

If we accept that she was in her 30s in the portrait, it would have been among Holland’s later works and the drawing of her with the long hook would have been done at some time after 1800. (The portrait in the Wikipedia article linked to above shows the Duchess at an even younger age but is not as clearly congruent in all facial details. Despite what may have been artistically licensed rhinoplasty, the eyes still have it.)

The drawing as it appears here is certain to have lost detail through repeated copying, but the position of the hands in it seems to conceal the stitching to an extent that makes its specific identification difficult. (Unequivocal evidence of tricot would be provided by at least a partial row of stitches being shown on the hook.) Regardless of the additional information the original drawing might reveal, it provides clear evidence of a long hook being used for some form of crochet in Scotland at least two decades before the first published descriptions of such fabric explicitly made with that implement.

The name the Duchess used for the depicted activity is a matter of speculation. If it was a craft she had learned as a child or in her youth, it would most likely have been what we now call slip stitch crochet. In that case the drawing provides evidence of the long hook being used in a context where a flat hook might otherwise have been expected. However, such use is illustrated elsewhere and is a fully plausible alternative that leads to the nomenclatural can of worms where shepherd’s knitting and Scottish knitting (tricot écossais) are found.

If the Duchess followed trends in the development of the hooked yarncraft, or first turned her attention to it later in life, by the 1830s ordinary crochet would be an unsurprising further alternative. The long hook is attested in that context as well — a craft generally termed ‘crochet’ regardless of the type of hook used for it.

Finally, tricot stitches that intrinsically require the use of a long hook were varied and sophisticated by the time of their initial description in the fancywork press in 1858. Although we don’t know when their development started, it is entirely reasonable to take the pre-1839 drawing as evidence of it.

In any case, there appears to have been a substantive basis for the name Tricot Ecossais introduced by Riego. Whatever its actual derivation may have been, it seems likely that it was not simply a fanciful coinage.

Looped Fabric

The long hook in 1800

9 March 20171 April 2023 Cary KarpLeave a comment

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

8 February 20177 March 2023 Cary KarpLeave a comment

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.

Looped Fabric

Flat-hook crochet in 1833

30 January 20175 February 2023 Cary KarpLeave a comment

The instructions for the three crocheted purses in the 1823 volume of Penélopé provide the first known written description of crochet in its modern form. The 1833 volume of the same periodical includes a section headed Something more about crochet. This provides a number of instructions that introduce additional techniques, all of which will be considered in detail in later posts. For now, though, I’m going to continue with forms of crochet that are generically associated with the type of hook used to make them.

I started this in the preceding post by leaping forward to the 1858 descriptions of the long hook that is fundamental to Tunisian crochet. Those references were among the first to associate the long hook explicitly with crochet, but the same tool had a prior link with knitting that is described in earlier documents — and was generally termed a ‘tricot hook’ or ‘tricot needle’ in the one context, and a ‘hooked knitting needle’ in the other.

Similarly, one of the details about crochet added to the 1833 Penélopé text was the recommended use of a flat hook for work in heavier yarn, as an alternative to the tambour needle that was preferable for finer silk:

For coarse work in yarn or thick knitting cotton, one uses a copper hook of this formwhich must be very smooth and, from above, must be very thin.

This tool — which is still used in the illustrated form — was commonly termed a ‘shepherd’s hook’ and had an eponymous association with ‘shepherd’s knitting.’ That genre is now more frequently referred to as slip stitch crochet, with an imprecise range of terms taken from ongoing (or imagined) regional slip-stitch traditions applied to the hook. I’m going stay on the safe side and use the generic designation ‘flat hook,’ as I’m also doing with the long hook.

A significant amount of confusion about shepherd’s knitting has resulted from the plethora of names applied to both slip stitch and Tunisian crochet, and the quite different tools used for them. Since the earliest instructions for any form of crochet illustrate flat hooks, clarifying the distinction between the slip-stitched fabric they were used to produce and the altogether different structures made on long hooks is a matter that will be discussed at length on this blog.