James Lace Knitting

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78500-572-5
Verlag: Crowood
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Knitted lace is beautiful, ethereal and eminently achievable by any competent knitter. Written by a passionate lace knitter, this comprehensive book contains a brief history of lace knitting and considers the similarities between the genre from different traditions. Whilst using traditional motifs, Lace Knitting moves away from the traditional square shawls of the past and focuses on wedding wraps, scarves and throws, as well as household furnishings such as cushion covers. This book is beautifully illustrated and includes a brief history of lace knitting; information about yarns, tools and techniques and a fully illustrated stitchionary, with charts and written instructions. There is information on techniques, with over seventy lace motifs and embellishments including making bobbles, beading and how to create the Estonian Nupp. It also includes seven straightforward, but effective projects, all of which can be varied and made more or less complex by the knitter. It is exquisitely illustrated with 227 colour photographs and 76 line artworks. Helen James is an experienced knitter and has had a life-long love of lace and lace knitting.

Helen James learnt to knit as a child and has knitted ever since. She has had a life-long love affair with lace of all kinds and started knitting lace as an adult. More recently she has obtained her City and Guilds in Knitwear and Design, which allowed her to further develop her lace knitting skills and provided her with an opportunity to look at the fascinating history of lace knitting. Much of her inspiration comes from the beaches and countryside where she lives and from her frequent visits to the remoter areas and coasts of Scotland.

Autoren/Hrsg.

James, Helen

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1

A BRIEF HISTORY OF LACE KNITTING

Lace sampler from the Knitting and Crochet Guild collection. A good place to visit if you are interested in further research.

For many, it is the fine, white, wedding ring shawls of great complexity and beauty that spring to mind when first thinking about lace knitting.

It is the areas of Shetland, Estonia and Orenburg that provide the current main interest in knitted lace today, each with its own unique tradition and history of producing these shawls.

This interest in fine knitted lace, much loved and highly sought after by the Victorians across Europe, has enjoyed something of a revival in recent times and there are many skilled knitters who both enjoy recreating the old patterns and producing shawls and wraps of considerable beauty as well as producing new designs, all of which is contributing to the continued development and indeed survival of this fascinating art. But where did it come from?

It is widely believed that knitting originated in the Middle East and that it emanated from there through Spain during the Crusades in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and it is thought to have arrived in England in the mid thirteenth century.

Lace knitting, like knitting in general, has a fascinating history. It is not really known where it originated, but the earliest known example of lace in knitting is thought to be a pair of silk knitted hose featuring a diagonal Faggot pattern dated to the mid 1500s and which is housed at the Dresden Museum. Eleanora di Toledo, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, who died in 1562, was found to have been buried in a pair of silk lace stockings. Elizabeth I of England is thought to be the first British monarch to wear silk stockings. It is said that in 1560 a Mrs Montague, who was a lady in waiting to Elizabeth, presented the Queen with a gift of knitted silk stockings with a diamond lace motif. The story maintains that the Queen was so taken with these stockings that she had Mrs Montague make her more. Indeed, there is a pair of lacy knit stockings in this design, said to be of approximately the right age, on display at Hatfield House, the childhood home of the Queen. Whilst this does suggest that lace knitting was a recognized skill in the mid 1500s, it is simply not known if there is any truth to this particular story. It is suggested in the literature that this pattern may have originated in France, but nobody actually knows.

An example of fine Shetland Lace from the collection at the Unst Heritage Centre, Haroldswick.

This is an example of Estonian lace knitting, the Maikel shawl from a pattern by Nancy Bush.

A gate to a beach warning of mermaids, who are associated in folklore with the origins of lace.

The earliest inklings of lace associated with the Shetland Isles were found with the remains of the ‘Gunnister Man’, discovered in a peat bog near Gunnister, Shetland, in 1951. The remains were subsequently dated to 1680–90, so somewhat later than the earlier examples of lace from Dresden, Italy and Queen Bess’s stockings. Alongside the preserved knitted garments found with the body was a fragment of knitting of a lace diamond motif created from yarn-over increases and decreases. Debate continues as to whether or not Gunnister Man was a local or a visiting sailor, due to the Dutch and Swedish coins that were found with him, but whatever his origins, this small fragment of knitted lace suggests that lace knitting might have been known and possibly practised in Shetland earlier than the current evidential base is able to demonstrate.

Because of the lack of evidence or a clearly established timeline for the development of knitted lace, there is a certain mystique about its origins. This has led to legends and folklore as to how it began in different parts of the world. Perhaps my favourite is the story from Shetland that a mermaid wove together the foam from the waves to make a garment so that she could be appropriately clad whilst on dry land visiting the fisherman that she loved. It is told that the islanders were so taken with this garment that they set about trying to copy it, thus creating the lovely lace with which the islands are associated.

Example of a sampler showing the skill of the knitters. This can be seen in the collection of the Knitting and Crochet Guild.

In the past, the traditions of knitting were handed down from generation to generation, by word of mouth, with children learning the knitted patterns from their parents, grandparents and other family members. Lace knitting traditions were shared in the same way, and whilst it may seem amazing to us, patterns, including the most complex, were committed to memory, and were knitted and shared without ever being recorded. Despite the lack of written patterns, it seems likely that knowledge of the patterns travelled from place to place, which would in part explain the similarity of motifs in lace knitting from various parts of the world. There is little doubt that historically there was far more travel, particularly overseas, than might hitherto have been imagined, with well-established routes between Northern Europe, the Shetland Islands and Southern Europe, dating back to the days of the Vikings. This would have allowed the knowledge of designs, techniques and motifs to move with sailors and travellers passing through, and to then be copied and further developed or adapted by knitters in their own countries.

Any hope that the names of the lace patterns might shed some light as to their origins rapidly vanishes after any initial research. Many of the patterns are named for the everyday things that people saw around them, for example, leaves, paws, flowers, insects and birds to name but a few. However, it quickly becomes apparent that the names of lace patterns are frequently confusing, with the same names being used to describe different motifs, and the same motifs cropping up in different lace traditions with different names. For example, the Estonian Peacock Tail motif is the same as the Shetland Horseshoe lace motif, but which came first? Nobody knows.

As lace knitting became more popular, it became a leisure pastime of wealthy Victorian women, as well as continuing to be an income-generating pastime in places such as Shetland, Orenburg and Estonia. Victorian ladies created samplers of their patterns as an aide-memoire and to show off their skills. These are often extremely intricate, and provide a fascinating insight into the skill of these knitters in times past. Many of these have survived and can be found housed in museums around the world.

The written published pattern is a relatively recent development in the world of knitting, only becoming established in the Victorian era when printed pamphlets containing ‘receipts’ for knitted goods increasingly became available.

Early written patterns provide a fascinating glimpse into the development of pattern writing, but can be more or less indecipherable to today’s knitter, with authors having their own shorthand and symbols for the instructions which need to be patiently decoded by today’s knitter, a challenging exercise and not for the faint-hearted! Not all patterns were accurate, and some were downright impossible, suggesting a lack of testing in some cases before publication!

The written pattern in a form that is more widely recognized today became increasingly common in the early part of the twentieth century. Patterns for knitted items during both world wars were readily available with much encouragement from the government of the day to knit for the war effort. After the Second World War, knitting patterns became increasingly commonplace and were widely published in women’s magazines, and became readily available in any outlet that also sold yarn. Whilst it is possible to find patterns from the post war era for lace, much of what was available was less intricate than the fine lace knitting of the past and often took the form of lacy baby blankets, evening stoles or cardigans. In recent years, however, with the rise of the internet and the increased interest in fine lace knitting, written and charted patterns for extremely intricate lace shawls are now widely available. The majority of books of stitches will include some lace motifs, and specialist books relating to specific lace traditions are now available.

In conclusion, whilst it is impossible to say where or how the knitting of lace evolved, given that there are such distinct similarities in many aspects of design across the different lace traditions both from northern and southern Europe, it would be difficult to believe that they each developed in isolation from one another.

The extent to which overseas trade and travel was happening in earlier centuries is not always recognized but the fact that Shetland and Orenburg, for example, were based in strategically important areas in terms of trade routes, together with Shetland’s fishing industry which also attracted travellers, must surely have had some bearing on the early development of lace knitting. Similarly, travel to and from England to all parts of Europe and beyond was well established by the nineteenth century and equally opened another route for ideas, techniques and designs to travel. Consequently, it is very difficult to believe that each knitted lace tradition emerged, fully formed in the mid nineteenth century. Due to the lack of physical evidence, however, it is quite possible that we will never really know for sure where lace knitting first emerged, nor be able to track its development over the centuries.

The whole picture is...