First day of class

Our class photo (minus a few people) is now at the bottom of the page.

We looked at some examples of the projects we'll be making: felted bag, multi-color hat, cabled mittens, and a project of choice from Bush's Knitting in Estonia. Yes, it's a lot of knitting for one month, but this class is the full-time job of these students over January term. Project instructions and supply lists to follow in other posts.

Many of the students have some previous knitting experience; others are hoping to learn a new relaxing hobby. For the latter students tonight's assignment is to teach themselves to knit. I've provided links to a couple of websites with good pictures and video instruction in the sidebar of the main blog page. I hope the experience of learning to knit alone can be constructively compared to learning upcoming techniques as a member of a group. I would also like students to experiment with different ways of holding the yarn and needles rather than being "forced" to do it a certain way by a teacher. When they are somewhat comfortable forming the stitches we can talk about the way holding the yarn affects tension and uniformity of stitches. As the class progresses we’ll look at geographic variation in the ways of holding yarn and needles.

Students who already know how to knit should concentrate on how stitches are constructed during knitting and then try to go backwards to undo knit and purl stitches so that they can learn how to fix mistakes on the current row. Tuesday we'll discuss this, show it to the new knitters, and look at ways to fix mistakes in lower rows without extensive ripping.

For information on the history of knitting, I have relied on the texts noted in the Knitting Books section. Although we didn’t have much time left to talk about the subject, I showed students photos of Egyptian socks created by nalbinding, thought by Rutt to be the pre-cursor to knitting. In fact, it’s rather difficult in some cases to tell the difference between fabric created through nalbinding and knitting as seen in the red Egyptian socks, which look like stitches knit through the back loop. Dillettante offers photos of modern nalbound (nalbinded?) socks, tools, and instructions. To my eye, these modern pieces seem to more closely resemble crochet than knitting. (Excuse my split infinitives.)

The earliest knitted items are also found in Egypt. A desert climate is more conducive to preserving knit items than a humid climate so it’s possible that ancient knits just didn’t last long enough to be found in more humid climates. However, given the similarity of knitting to nalbinding and the knit objects discovered, the best evidence we have suggests that knitting developed in Egypt and spread to Europe. (Knitting may have also developed separately in Venezuela, Guyana, and Brazil – more on this later.) Some of the oldest (11th-13th centuries) surviving knitted items are Egyptian socks – natural and indigo dyed cotton, knit in the round using color-stranded technique. Lilinah biti-Anat has created replicas and offers a pattern. The earliest (16th century) European knitting, according to Rutt, is found in Spain, indicating that knitting spread from North Africa to Europe with Islamic culture. Liturgical gloves knit in silk and silver gilt thread are a nice example of the fine craftsmanship done at this time.

To be continued in later lectures.