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.