Where’s the geography?

Contrary to somewhat popular belief, geography is not about memorizing state capitals. A simple definition is that geography is the study of spatial relationships – how things vary in space. In other words geographers try to answer where and why there questions. We look for patterns - are things clustered or dispersed?, is the location of one thing dependent upon the location of another?, etc. – and we try to explain why those patterns exist.

After defining some color terms in today’s class, we looked at how colors and designs vary by place. My material for this section relies mostly on Feitelson, McGregor, and Keele (full references are in the Knitting Books list to your right).

Knitting more than one color in a row goes back to the origins of knitting. The oldest surviving knits are the Egyptian socks that date to the 11th-13th centuries. In Europe the knit purse found with the Gunnister man in Shetland had several rows of two-color knitting and dates back to the 1600’s. It’s likely that a traditional knitter’s color choices were inspired by their physical landscape. Colors in Fair Isle knitting seem drawn from the misty seascape, spring flowering fields, or moss and lichen covered rocks. (If you want to experiment with choosing colors this way, try Degraeve’s Color Palette.) Of course, colors are initially limited by the available wool and the natural materials that could be made to dye the wool. The way that colors are combined to produce designs shows some distinct regional differences.

What is commonly called Fair Isle knitting is specifically two colors in a row of knitting using Shetland wool. The sheep of Shetland were originally brought from Scandinavia and their wool was originally plucked during shedding season rather than sheared; this produced a softer wool than shearing does. Shetland sheep produce a variety of colors in white, gray, light brown, and dark brown and these could be dyed using such materials as plants and lichens into a wider range of colors. The wool lends a general haziness to the designs which allows the colors to blend. Geometric patterns generally show an alternation of peeries of two to four rows and allovers of five to thirteen rows. Colors are usually grouped with groups alternating with the bands of patterns and within a band arranged symmetrically around a high contrast center row. Additionally there should be sufficient contrast between the pattern and the background.

In the nearby Faroe Islands, patterns are often less complex, perhaps more repetitive, and wool often remains in its natural colors. The overall color effect is more subtle than Fair Isle knitting. In both places the two-color stranded knitting creates a thicker fabric which protects against the harsh winds of these rocky islands.

Compare knitting in these places to the high contrast knitting of Norway with designs of stars, snowflakes, reindeer, flowers, and people in black and white or red and white. This color combination has come to represent traditional Norwegian knitting yet it began in one small town as the result of one young Selbu girl’s mittens. In a community where mittens were created by nalbinding that were sometimes decorated with embroidery, Marit Emstad decided to knit a pair of black and white mittens incorporating designs from bridal embroidery and wore the results to church around 1855. The crowd went wild, then went home and reproduced what she had done incorporating designs from nature, wood carvings, and embroidery. Soon everyone in Selbu was wearing and knitting these mittens and the trend spread throughout Norway. Norwegian wool is denser and shinier than Shetland wool helping to keep the high contrast colors distinct.

The black and white color scheme is also found in Sanquhar gloves from Scotland, although the designs always seem to be geometric – often small squares with diamonds.

For some of the most complex color schemes look to Bohus, Sweden, for designs that use angora blend wools whose fuzziness creates a haze that adds to the sense of blended colors. Bohus knitting often incorporates purl stitches to create texture. This also increases the complexity of the color design as the purl stitches create unexpected bumps of color in the fabric. Unlike previously discussed designs, Bohus often uses more than two colors in a single row.

More tomorrow…