{"id":173,"date":"2010-01-28T08:00:07","date_gmt":"2010-01-28T16:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ittakesballstoknit.wordpress.com\/?p=173"},"modified":"2010-01-28T08:00:07","modified_gmt":"2010-01-28T16:00:07","slug":"a-brief-history-of-knitting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ittakesballstoknit.com\/?p=173","title":{"rendered":"A brief history of … knitting."},"content":{"rendered":"

I hope you didn’t think I was going to put time in there (sorry to steal your title Stephen). The other day while I was knitting on the Transit system here, a stranger started talking to me about the fact that they rarely see people knitting in public, much less a man. In fact, they had never even seen a man knitting before. This got my interest a little piqued, because I know knitting has been around for a very long time. I had heard stories of references to knitting as far back as the ancient Egyptians and I knew men had a lot to do with it. So I thought I would do a little research to see what I could dig up … this is what I have found out, very briefly.<\/p>\n

Knitting as we know it today has only been around for about 1200 years or so. Yes, I know that seems like a long time, but in the course of human history it really isn’t. Its development however, started some time before that. In fact, it is believed that knitting first started with only one needle. The oldest form is called cross-knitting where the stitches were rotated a half-turn instead of being aligned vertically as they are today. This method was highly developed and used to form fringes on woven cloths in Pre-Columbian Peru by the Nazca culture. There are also examples of socks and other items made with this technique found in Egyptian burials, the earliest of these possibly dating back to 4th or 5th century BC. It is believed this technique developed into another called nalbinding. There are references of it online if you care to search, but the technique is difficult to master.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The best example we have of knitting with two needles and pulling loops through loops is from around 1000CE. Because these examples (socks) are quite intricate, it is believed that the technique was probably developed a few generations before that to allow for the perfection of the art. At this time the only stitch known to knitters was the knit stitch and all objects were made in stocking stitch by doing the work in the round with 5 a number of needles. This technique is still used today. Sometimes the objects were made flat by cutting which required steeks – a topic we’ll cover in the near future. Knitting was still a very exclusive trade and enjoyed by the wealthy. Knitted garments back then were made with very fine yarn and mostly cotton or silk. For this reason (and a few more) it is believed that knitting first started in the middle east or Spain.<\/p>\n

In the mid 1500’s there came a major breakthrough in knitting – the PURL stitch. This allowed having garments with edges that didn’t curl – how neat was that. Shortly after that wool hats and garments began to appear. As the art of knitting had spread through the trade routes and become popular in Europe, the common man learned to knit and used the fiber he had access to – wool. Even though he had access to wool it was not as abundant as it is today and so a lot of garments were knit and then unraveled and re-knit when hey became too small. Basically wool was re-used until it wore out. Now that economics had taken knitting from the wealthy and placed it in the hands of the common people, developments began to appear at a furious pace.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately though, there was no common language to tell people how to make a knitted garment. Patterns were passed on through word-of-mouth and took a long time to learn. This is evident in the history of Aran sweaters. Since each family would pass the pattern down through each generation, you could often tell a family line by the pattern of the sweater they were wearing. It wasn’t until the early 1900’s before a system of documenting stitches and stitch patterns was developed. While there haven’t been any major changes in knitting since the purl stitch, the development of it as an industry has simply exploded since the early 1900’s. It would take much more space than I would like to use to get into that so I’ll leave it at this for now and tackle that one in a future post – or maybe two.<\/p>\n

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Hugzzz \ud83d\ude0e<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hope you didn’t think I was going to put time in there (sorry to steal your title Stephen). The other day while I was knitting on the Transit system here, a stranger started talking to me about the fact that they rarely see people knitting in public, much less a man. In fact, they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-173","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-discussion","7":"pmpro-has-access","8":"czr-hentry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pNDS0-2N","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ittakesballstoknit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ittakesballstoknit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ittakesballstoknit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ittakesballstoknit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ittakesballstoknit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ittakesballstoknit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ittakesballstoknit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ittakesballstoknit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ittakesballstoknit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}