The Autumn is creeping up on me and I have been inspired to haul out my knitting needles and to start a new project which I will likely spend all winter poking along at, only to shove back into the basket come March. I really enjoy knitting, but I’m not quite as fond of finishing things.
Anyone who is a knitter will know the comfort that comes along with knitting on a project. Unless, of course, you suck at knitting. Then, those long hours usually just serve to taunt and irritate until you man-up to the truth that knitting is not for the likes of you. If that is your situation, you might want to look around for other hobbies with which to pass the time. Like archery or maybe parkour.
For those of us who enjoy our time behind the needles, knitting provides a meditation of sorts, and offers the satisfaction of being able to look back over the endless number of linked loops we’ve just connected, so to appreciate our progress.
Knitting has a deep history. The earliest artifactual evidence was discovered in Egypt and is thought to have been knitted during the 11th century. It is/was a pair of socks.
Prior to that time, and often considered the precursor of the technique of knitting, was something called Nalebinding which saw fabric being constructed through the use of loops and a single needle. There was a pair of, again, socks found in an Egyptian tomb in relatively good shape (with a separated Big Toe so that the wearer could wear their flip flops along with their socks, presumably in the afterlife) from the 5th century that look remarkably similar to today’s knitwear, but since knitting distinguishes itself through use of the Purl stitch, they could somehow tell that these socks had been nalebinded.
There have been several snatches of knitwear recovered in the colder regions of Europe that have been attributed to the 12th and 13th centuries and it appears that mittens were the bits that were destined to survive from those periods.
By the 14th century, knitting had become so commonplace that the Italian painter Tommaso da Modena painted a portrait that showed the Virgin Mary knitting, and he was by no means the only painter showing her thusly employed. I mean…it’s possible, I suppose.
Knitting started getting fancy in the mid-16th century and one of the Medici wives in Italy was actually buried in a knitted pair of red silk stockings that used a ‘yarn-over’ pattern to form a lace-like effect. Lots of questions raised through that last sentence, non?
In Britain, knitting really began to hit its stride in the late 1500s when Queen Elizabeth I was introduced to the soft delights of knitted silk stockings. Once she was on board, everyone grabbed their needles and started knitting! Finer and finer wool became the focus and eventually stockings made in England were being sold in the Netherlands, Spain, and Germany.
Knitting was a job that everyone could do and there are many stories of fishermen knitting their own sweaters and of shepherds out in the fields knitting while their flocks grazed. Warm knitted sweaters, socks, and hats would be very useful in those sorts of professions.
Then, with the Industrial Revolution, machines were invented to knit. They could do the work in a fraction of the time that it took to do the job by hand and could be operated by those without knitting expertise, thus saving money while turning out products at previously unimagined speeds. As the work of hand knitting was being wrenched from the fingers of skilled men and women to be given over to machinery, as favoured by the industrialists, the built-up emotions of a generation of tradespeople who had already seen so many professions swept aside by soulless machines, boiled over. By 1779, the stocking and woolen trades in Britain had had enough.
There are several credible and incredible reports of how the backlash started, but they all seemed to boil down to an incident of aggressive vandalism of these knitting machines. Suffice it to say that an apprentice named Ned Ludd, or someone hiding behind his name, went into his place of employment and smashed two knitting machines to bits, in exasperation. This protest spoke to the frazzled nerves of others who were equally frustrated with how their livelihoods were being taken away from them, and soon other knitting machines were being sabotaged and smashed in other factories, in protest. These folks called themselves Luddites.
Well, all hell broke loose and soon the Luddites were meeting secretly at night to strategize and practice military-like drills and attacks. Their schemes included letter-writing campaigns to complain about machinery taking the jobs of qualified workers but their threats of machine wrecking, along with actually making good on those threats, made them a force to be reckoned with.
The army was called out, the punishments for those caught were unduly severe, and eventually life moved along.
As the call for handmade knit goods in the marketplace decreased, home knitting as a hobby or a pastime increased. Published patterns were introduced during the mid 19th century and knitters of all skill levels never looked back!
The history of knitting has been woven one loop at a time and each person who works the needles shares a link with the sock knitters of Egypt, the favoured stocking maker of the late Mrs Medici, the mitten knitters of the 13th century, those sweater-knitting fishermen and shepherds, and would end up on the right side of the Luddites. The strand that connects all of us to that long and cozy history is that continual piece of yarn that gets looped in exactly the same manner onto one needle and then, by almost a sleight of hand, gets picked up by the other needle and absorbed into the growing fabric.
Now, if you will excuse me, all of this knitting talk makes me want to get back to my project!
The wool store is probably still open…you should run over, just for a look.
