The Victorian Court reinvented hand knitting without great attention to historical facts. One of their myths was that most knitting was done by amateurs  - e.g., some woman in the household.

In fact, in various periods, England had robust guilds of professional knitters. Even after the guilds of professional knitters had declined, there were collectives of contract knitters, that would spend part of most days knitting objects for sale through commercial channels.  Regions developed particular skills for knitting certain kinds of objects. Those skills represented a comparitive economic advantage, and factors would come to those regions to buy knit objects for sale elsewhere.

Part of the comparative advantage of a region would be a specialized knitting toolkit for knitting certain kinds of objects. We have forgotten that knitting toolkits can be specialized - today everyone has very generalized knitting needles. In most strata of the knitting community, most people use circular needles for socks, baby clothes, and sweaters. 

However, if my family made most of their cash income from knitting ganseys for sailors and your family  made most of its cash income from knitting socks for royalty, then we might have different tool kits. 

Certainly, a knitting toolkit optimized for ganseys or fine socks can be used for knitting anything needed by anyone in the extended family. Still, toolkits for knitting can be optimized for a particular kind of knitting.

There were a lot of different styles of knitting sheaths produced by various regions in different periods of history. I have long wondered if the differences were just regional and/or temporal variance or whether they indicated different knitting techniques which were useful for knitting different kinds of objects.

There is a bunch of yarn sitting on bobbins waiting for the twist to relax, so I have been finishing up a bunch of old knitting works in progress.  This has involved abrupt transitions between objects with different needs. None of the gentile approaches, where one starts knitting swatches, and gradualy falls in love with the style of the fabric, and accustomed to the technique used to produce that fabric.  No! I pick up a KIP, and with the knitting sheath at hand, I start knitting. 

My conclusion is that Durham Sheaths are better for the technique that I call "gansey knitting", and Yorkshire Goose Wings are much better for what I call "swaving.  I have settled on using the Durham Sheath for knitting anything a fisherman might use - anything knit from 5-ply worsted spun 1,000 ypp yarns. For such knitting, I use blunt "needles" (aka "pricks") , about 30 cm long and between 1.5 mm and 2.3 mm in diameter. I have stopped using 16" and 18" long "gansey needles".  The skills learned from swaving have informed and refined my gansey knitting skills, so now the shorter pricks are are faster and more convenient. I have knit swatches (pronounced as "socks")  from 4-ply equivalent to the  4-ply Beehive listed by Gladys Thompson for the fine Norfolk - Sheringham ganseys, knit at 12 spi and 20 rpi on 1.65 mm needles.  For these fabrics I prefer the Durham Sheath with spring steel blunt spring steel pricks.  However, the first time I strapped on a Yorkshire goose wing, I was struck with the absolute brilliance of the design for general purpose knitting. (It took me a long, long time to come to appreciate the virtues of  Durham sheaths.)

I am not saying one kind of knitting is better than the other. A well knit gansey has saved many a British seaman from hypothermia - and allowed Britain to rule the seas, and Britain to become very rich.  I am very partial to objects knit from 5-ply worsted spun 1,000 ypp yarns.  My wife is generally partial to objects knit  more softly; and; such objects are quickly and easily produced with a Yorkshire goose wing. (However, I have swaved wicked hard fabrics from fine cotton crochet thread.)

Posture while knitting - Or a Perch for knitting.

Over the years, I have used several favorite knitting chairs. Each seemed to work best with a particular kind of knitting sheath. (Airline seats like leather knitting pouches!)

A review of old depictions of knitters suggested that while Victorian and modern knitters were often depicted in various armchairs (often padded or stuffed) older depictions tended to put the knitters on low benches or stools.

After some trials, I have settled on a little Ottoman stool as my new favorite knitting “chair”.   It is low enough that I can easily reach down and touch the floor, and this is my first knitting chair where the top of my thighs are approximately level, and I can set my feet flat on the floor.   It is not a place to lounge at one’s leisure. However, I am not perched there to lounge at my leisure – I set there to knit.

The first thing that I notice is that most of my various styles of knitting sheaths work very well; and all allow very fast knitting. The perch involves a bit of athleticism that encourages fast knitting.

All of a sudden, a small goose-wing I made 10-years ago with needle hole lined with brass and epoxy is a favored knitting sheath for use with 18” long gansey needles. I never knew it could work so well with long needles. It can be tucked over my right hip and used with short needles for knitting socks, or with curved needles to allow swaving fine gloves or hose; or, tucked into my belt over my right gluteus to firmly anchor long needles for fast knitting of ganseys.

While I love sitting in the benches along the San Francisco waterfront and knitting, I expect that the low stone benches along the quays in the UK, provided seating more conducive to fast knitting than the more comfortable park benches along the SF water front. In a bench with a back that slants back, I knit much slower.

About 20 years ago, I started my exploration of how durable, weatherproof wool seaman’s garments could have been expeditiously produced prior to 1840.

Early on, it became clear that the style of knitting had to be very ergonomic so rapid knitting could be sustained for a very long time. 

I had to discard the modern conventional wisdom.  Traditional knitters used knitting sheaths, knitting sticks, and knitting belts.  Few modern knitters use these tools. There were at least 3 classes of “needles” used with these tools, and much of the knowledge of these needles has been lost.  Early on, I discovered the virtues of long “gansey” needles, and later I discovered the virtues of long blunt needles.

The above tools allowed me to knit a bunch of weatherproof, durable sweaters, and great piles of good warm socks (pronounced “swatches”).

Early in the process, I had started spinning my own yarns, which I knit while they still had (Alden Amos’s recipe) spinning oil on them. The oil was washed out during blocking. Then the finished objects were “oiled” with lanolin A recent knitting project reminds me that commercial (not oiled) yarns are not pleasant to knit on gansey needles. I did not mention this issue before, and I am sure people that ran into it think I must be crazy.

Also, for a very long time, my favorite knitting chair was one of our folding deck chairs. They are certainly comfortable for a couple of hours knitting. However, if I have a gansey to knit and a short time to knit it, I use one of our little Ottoman stools. The Ottoman is not as comfortable to just sit on, but, that position allows me to knit longer and faster.  Now, I see that Ottoman forces me into a posture like what I see in old drawings and tapestries depicting knitters.

Some while back, I read an account of professional knitters who were each able to produce a good seaman’s gansey every 3 days. At the time I dismissed the account as impossible. However, today, I could replicate my “Rose Garden” gansey in less than a week. That sweater took me more than a month to knit; it protected me while I did essential work in some terrible storms, and it saved my life when I got caught in a fire. It is a good gansey.

My point in this post is that it is not a single tool or skill that allows very rapid finishing of a gansey or other large knitting project. Expeditiously knitting large objects is the of pulling together several sets of tools, skills and insights that are no longer commonly found among knitters.

For example, I consider long steel needles to be essential to rapidly hand knitting good seaman’s sweaters, but they are so much faster and easier to use with oiled yarn.  On the other hand, I consider yarn hand spun “in the grease” to be of intrinsically low quality. One cannot control grist while spinning in the grease, and accurate twist and grist is essential to high quality yarn.  Fleece should be scoured, dyed, then oiled prior to being carded/combed, and spun.

Learning advance knitting

Carson Demers (https://www.ergoiknit.com/ ) and I met on the SF quay the other day and had a little master’s class on swaving. I gave him the Durham style knitting sheath that I originally made for Alden Amos, and we worked on his swaving technique.  He is a better teacher than I am; and, now he can offer/ teach more techniques for ergonomic knitting.