Supporting your work

Basically, large objects get supported on the lap, whether you are working with circs, 3+1 x 14" DPN with a Shetland knitting pouch, 4+1 x 18" gansey needles, or 6+1 x 12" Scottish needles.

If you are knitting a gansey or rug for the Queen, then it helps to fold-up the completed work, and hold it together with a few stitches of waste yarn so it is easier to turn, and to keep it from dragging on the floor.

Very large pieces can be hung from a hook on a swivel attached to a belt, at or just below the waist or the bottom of the knitting sheath.  Again the object in progress is held in a compact shape with a few stitches of waste yarn.  This works for things like shawls and lace table cloths.  However, this is awkward, and you may have to adjust the yarn path or or switch to continental knitting, but it does allow working the edge of an object that is several feet in diameter and where the row you are working on contains thousands of stitches.  Normally, a modern knitter would think about doing such a object on circs with long cables (tucking the center bulk of the object into a bag to facilitate handling.)  

However, DPN with a knitting sheath allow finer and faster knitting, that cannot be sustained on circs.  And, the weight of the object hanging from a hook suspended from the bottom of the knitting sheath helps to counter balance the weight of the object on the needles.  If museum collections are any guide, then at one time such counter balance devices were fairly common.  Of course, if you are just knitting socks, a clew hanging from the bottom of your knitting sheath, will keep your yarn out of the mud as you knit on the quay and counter balance the weight on the needles.

I had better stop.  I have written too much about too little.

Wassit? Wassit? No clew on the Internet!

Some have been surprised not to find how to use a clew on the Internet.

They would not find much on wassit either. Wassit was the inexpensive, tightly spun, indigo dyed, knitting yarn that was ubiquitous on the shores of the English Channel 500 years ago. It was used for knitting everything from underwear and socks to ganseys for the fishermen. Why doesn’t something that important show up on the Internet?

A clew is simply a hook, hung from the belt, on which a ball of yarn is impaled. Many designs work. I simply bent a spiral of wire so that it clipped on to a leather work belt and held a wire claw (from the same root) upwards to hold my yarn.

Very likely some of the hooks on the lower end of knitting sheaths, that museum curators tell me were to hold the knitting, were actually clews to hold yarn. (Since the museums did not have needles for those sheaths, it is unlikely that the curators had actually tried knitting with such an arrangement.) However, as you knit round and round, hooks attached to the knitting get all tangled up. However, used as clews, the hooks hanging from the bottom of the knitting sheath work just fine. And, even when I am working on the second sleeve, I have not had a problem with the gansey touching the floor. So, I see no need or advantage from a hook to hold the knitting.

Clews work with either center-pull or outside in balls. Every so often you will have to reset the ball, and for center pull balls, rewind them, but it is knitting, not rocket science. They are useful if you are camping or knitting while walking or if your hut has a mud floor.