How I (learned to) Knit

Everyone knitted a certain way and then World War II happened?

With my first pair of size 7 needles and teal yarn¹, I mimicked Mary Benton’s hand movements, holding the working yarn in my right hand, tucking the right hand needle through the back of the first stitch on the left needle, and letting go of the right needle to wrap the yarn around the right needle clockwise to make a stitch. While I didn’t have a name for it yet, this is English knitting, or throwing.

When consulting a video tutorial by BHooked Knitting to make the Simple Hat, I thought I had been doing knitting all wrong. This person looped the yarn around their left index finger and used the right needle to pick up the yarn, wrapping it around to make a stitch. Turns out, this is Continental knitting.

Why two ways?

Well like most things (language, math, cooking), different methods of knitting originated in different parts of the world. The history of hand knitting itself is extremely interesting and there are works of art dating back to the Medieval and Renaissance periods depicting people knitting textiles by hand (e.g., the knitting madonnas) as well as fragments of knitted garments from the Medieval period ranging from Egypt to Norway. A major resource I used in my search for knitting history was A History of Hand Knitting, written by Richard Rutt in 1987, plus some anecdotes from Mary Benton herself.

Earliest knitting

It seems to actually be quite challenging to trace the origin of knitting. As Rutt points out, there is even disagreement linguistically that ancient Greeks and Latin speaking peoples had a word for knitting…so then did they actually knit? For one, knitting is categorically different from weaving, for which we have ample evidence of the history of woven textiles throughout human history. Knitting is also not crocheting, for which we also have ample evidence of the history of crocheting, from Tunisia and elsewhere. Of course, knitting could have developed from weaving or crocheting, which we know predate knitting, or some other way of constructing objects (e.g., objects made by nailbinding found in Egypt, Syria, and the Levant) by joining pieces of fabric, thread, or yarn but to pinpoint exactly where and when knitting was invented is extremely difficult.

In any case, Rutt tells of the earliest physical example of knitting (in contrast to examples of knitting described in writing as he is very careful to point out the flawed sourcing of those accounts) was discovered in a late 2nd-century grave of a woman in southern Holland:

“There were two of them [bits of knitted fabric]…made of woolen yarn…in stockinet of very close gauge,” (pg. 28).

Though, most tragically, these two knit samples disentegrated during the extraction from the grave for archeological inspection.

Beyond that, there are beautiful examples of knitted textiles from Medival Egypt, Spain, and Scandinavia, featuring intricate colorwork in a variety of yarns. The image below of a knitted sock, estimated to be from Egypt circa 1100 A.D., features a heel turn worked in short rows which requires the purl stitch, clearly differentiating it from another yarn work technique. There are also incredible regional variations in knitting tradition, featuring iconography and textures important to local culture (e.g., Fair Isle knitting in Shetland) and influenced by social class and gender (in Medieval society, the profitable trade of knitting was reserved for men but women contributed to some degree, mostly in a domestic setting).

Remnant of a knitted sock dating from Egypt ca. 1100, image courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum

English vs. German

While Rutt gives some descriptions of knitting traditions outside of western Europe (e.g., the intricate geometric patterns of Peruvian knitting aided by controlling the yarn tension by wrapping it around the neck), the main focus of the writings on knitting technique, specifically the handling of the needles and yarn, focuses on England and Germany. It appears that for most of the European tradition of knitting, the “English” method is used:

“Carrying the yarn on the right hand seems to be the oldest way, at least in Western Europe. It can be seen in the pictures of thhe knitting madonnas. In Britian, at least, it has remained the normal way of knitting,” (pg. 20).

And given the rich tradition of knitting in the British Isles (Fair Isle, Shetland lace, the Guernseys of the Channel Islands), it is no wonder the English way of knitting is so prolific.

Meanwhile,

“Carrying the yarn over the left hand seems to have originated in Germany…the German method of hand knitting was well established in Russia by the end of the 18th century…[and] introduced to Norway² by upper-class knitters during the 19th century,” (pg. 21-22).

To throw or to pick?

So we have

• English = throwing
• German = picking

which seem to be used with basically the same occurrence in the US. And in some cases, like when dealing with two strands of yarn for colorwork, some can do both knitting styles at once. I tried to get the hang of German knitting, but my left hand might as well be cooked spaghetti with its lack of dexterity. Besides, once I brought up the fact of the two knitting styles, Mary Benton explained she taught us the English way because she believes it gives the knitter better control of the tension.

But what about Continental? Mary Benton also had something to say about this:

“With World War II, it became unfashionable to knit the German style, so it was referred to as Continental instead.”

Ah. Freedom fries all over again.

1. Another quirk of Mary Benton’s, learned from years of experience, was that learning people’s names for this class wasn’t very useful. Since Beginning Knitting 101 met just 3 times, it did seem rather silly to learn 5-10 peoples’ names. Instead, she referred to us by the color of our yarn. There was Ms. Lavender, Ms. Yellow, Ms. Gold, Ms. Heather Gray, Ms. Green, and myself, Ms. Teal. ↩

2. A notable difference between the German and Norwegian styles of knitting today is in the execution of the purl stitch, in which the yarn strand is not worked from the front but instead picked up from behind with the right needle, which requires less hand movement when doing things like ribbing where ‘normal’ purling requires moving the yarn from the knit position to the front. ↩

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