I spent my childhood in Norfolk so the huge skies and wild seascapes are as familiar a memory as the brisk wind that gusts in from the North Sea, leaving you reaching for a warm cosy jumper to protect yourself in. Even in the warmer months it can catch you unawares, but I don’t really mind – all of this forms part of the memory for me and welcomes me back whenever I visit.
[Read more…] about An Early Evening Walk in NorfolkUncategorized
Women and knitting
My earliest memories of knitting are my grandma carefully recreating beautiful French patterns for me and my younger sister – on my mum’s instruction. I would have the blue version and she the red one. My Nana on the other hand was much more slap-dash, re-knitting stripy numbers from unravelled garments, the stripes were arbitrary, paired together by chance. Her trade mark was overly long sleeves! It went without saying that grandmothers knitted and grandfathers did the gardening! My mum, a ‘60s feminist was not interested perpetuating this skill so I never learnt. I often think this is why I was so drawn to the skill as I became older, a kind of adverse attraction.
I always find it comforting to sit with women whilst they were knitting, it seems like such a calm thing to do, the rhythmical clicking of needles and patient casting off – a garment emerging from someone’s hands – the tension varying from knitter to knitter according to how they hold the wool and needles. When I visited my Swedish friend’s mother, she taught me yet another technique of knitting the Scandinavian way – which confused me further! Hand made things seems all the more precious nowadays when they are made so rarely and I always imagine what was going on whilst the knitter was making them – like a letter being written in a certain place and time, knitted fabrics transport me back to sitting with the knitter, imagining what they were thinking about, where they were in time and location. When I was at university, those of us who specialized in knitwear for our final collection were considered the brave, slightly blithe ones – you never knew how the knitting would come out – so much depended on the yarn, machine and your own expectations! The tailors played it safe, planning everything down to the last millimetre but us knitters – we could always steam out a couple of centimetre on the press if things didn’t go to plan!
Nowadays I think we are beginning to value traditional craftsmanship – or craftswomen ship more than in the past and value this craft as works of art, attributing it with more credibility. However, this was not the case in the past which means it is often very difficult to trace the authors of older pieces.
This led me to think about women in the knitting industry – past and present as the knitters are all too often forgotten. When you begin to look at the old photographs you can see the camaraderie of the women, such as the Scotch Fisher Girls – linked arms, wide smiles in what must have been a very hard life. They show the empowerment that women experience when they work closely together as a team. My mother-in-law can remember going to see these women when they came to Yarmouth in the early autumn (they followed the trawlers who in turn followed the herrings in their migration down the North Sea coast) when she was at junior school as they were quite a spectacle to behold. The girls would be ready and waiting in the harbour, knitting whilst the fish were unloaded so that they could be gutted, cleaned and packed into barrels ready to be sold.
Women were considered to be bad luck on-board a fishing boat and so the fishermen’s wives and daughters were given other duties in the fishing industry. One such “job” was to knit the wind and water proof Gansey jumpers that the fishermen wore under their work”slopps”. Such pride was taken in this craft that the most highly skilled women often became revered within their communities and several of their patterns can still be traced and attributed to them today. Esther Nurse is one such knitter, who came from a fishing family called the Middletons and another was Emily Codling who was apparently so fast at knitting that it would only take her a fortnight to knit up an entire Gansey jumper. Although it is worth mentioning that the Gansey knitters were not exclusively women – there were some men – (apparently even a grocer), but for the main part it was the women folk who knitted using knitting shields to hold their work in place whilst performing their many other daily chores.
MY KNITTING EXPERIENCE
When I worked at Benetton and Burberry in Italy, almost all the technicians who graded the patterns, worked out the yarn consumption, tested the yarns etc were women. The programmers who operated the computers were usually and still are men, but the knitters and linkers were women.
There is a great culture of knitting in Italy, based around Perugia and the river Tibur, also in Veneto to the North East and on the flat “pianura” plains of Emiglia Romagnia. These ladies know about yarns and stitches; they even have words in dialect scomar for example is the Veneto word for the knitted taping used on cardigan plackets. They also know how to make stitches work, how to avoid ribs pulling in too much, or wobbling and what to do if a yarn knits with an uneven tension.. In many ways, this knowledge is similar to the way recipes and ways of cooking are passed down through generations. In fact, one of the most knowledgeable knitting ladies at Benetton gave me some of her cake recipes before she retired!
(can we print this in B&W?)
When I first visited the Franca Patumi knitwear factory, just outside Perugia, in Italy, it reminded me of the feeling I used to get when, working with the ladies in Benetton. Immediately when I stepped inside the flimsy metal doors of the “capannone”, there was the familiar, metallic smell of the steaming press, damp wool, stacked up boxes of knitwear ready to ship, and rails of jumpers crammed full of pins, ready to be adjusted! The radio in the background playing saccharine Italian pop and all areas wer immaculately clean (probably because it was run by women!) There was a busy but calm feeling that you get when you know you’re in safe, expert hands. Franca Patumi is a family business, like so many Italian small scale manufacturers. Family members are at work at different jobs in the building, everyone chipping in and helping out; someone’s child needs collecting from netball practice – so an aunt runs out to collects her, as her mother is busy working on a pattern. On certain days the expert technicians come in to work on the latest prototypes. They have decades of experience between them working for the top Italian luxury brands, these ladies know how to make miracles happen! But the feeling of sisterhood is inspiring and uplifting. There’s a lot of laughter and good humoured banter, but they get the job done with pride and efficiency. Last time I visited we needed to try a jumper on a male model so they went to fetch a boy from the neighbouring office building as we didn’t have any in the factory! There were whoops of appreciation as he tried on a very flattering slim fit jumper – it was great to see the tables turned for a change – especially in a country which is often seen as quite sexist.
I wish I lived nearer so that I could pop in to Patumi when I’m having a solitary day working on my own as whenever I visit, I come away with a smile.
GROUP PHOTO PATUMI
Further reading:
Patterns for Guernseys, Jerseys & Arans; Fishermen’s Sweaters from the British Isles by Gladys Thompson
Cashmere/ Capra Hircus Laniger.
All of the cashmere in this collection comes from Inner Mongolia where breeding and grazing is carefully monitored. Here the higher quality fleeces found on the white and paler haired goats are selected as they can be easily over-dyed using natural plant based dyes – one of which, Weld has been used in this collection (called “Russet Green” in the colour options).
I wanted to use this naturally dyed yarn as the plant dyes produce beautiful, delicate hues which naturally fade with time, creating an aged “patina” similar to a well loved pair of jeans, rather than using chemical dyes which are potentially harmful to the local ecosystems and water supplies (let alone the potentially harmful effects on the wearer).
The other cashmere “colour” used in the collection is Cream which is actually the most pure, un-dyed fleece of the highly prized white cashmere goats. This fibre has been collected from animals which have been exclusively reared on a certified organic farm situated in Inner Mongolia and is run by a family of shepherds who take care of their flock.
These animals are allowed to graze freely in the vast surrounding area of the farmstead. In order to maintain the “organic” certification for this yarn, the whole life cycle of the animals and landscape are constantly monitored so that they can demonstrate the safe guarding of the place of origin of the raw materials (i.e. the cashmere). This means that not only are the animals carefully farmed and monitored but also the landscape is safeguarded and the welfare of the shepherds is ensured.
The reason the organic farm was started was due to the extreme over farming of the region in Outer Mongolia where nomadic herders who own the cashmere goats have been over-breeding their herds for years in order to produce more quantity of lower grade (not white) cashmere (making it more accessible to an end consumer). The down side of this trend has led to chronic overgrazing, effectively turning the landscape into a desert. The organic farm aims to “educate” the traditional nomadic herders by showing them that it would be better to limit the amount of animals that graze on the grasslands and not to invest in more animals but rather that they should choose to start a higher quality breeding process, upgrading the goats in their herds (aiming for better quality fibre – white) where they would get more money per kilo when it is sold to the mills.
Cashmere historically has always been a highly prized material, cherished, darned and passed down through generations. In more recent years it has become much more accessible commodity with many people owning more than one piece. Unfortunately this has resulted in the over-farming of these animals and endangering their natural habitat – in a similar way to cattle in other parts of the world. Far better then, to save up for, buy and treasure the best cashmere that you can afford, knowing that it has come from the highest quality, most sustainable source on the planet.
British wool; Natural, sustainable fibres.
Charl knitwear – made from British wool; When I was in the initial research stages of this collection, I was very surprised to find that there were only a handful of knitwear brands that use British wool to knit their jumpers.
It’s pretty common to read the words “spun in the UK” or British “spun” yarn – which means the wool itself comes from overseas – usually New Zealand, but is spun into yarn in the UK. It is much harder find actual British produced wool.
I was disappointed to discover this because it seemed like such a waste of resources. Anyone who drives or walk through the British countryside can see how many sheep there are in the fields – virtually all of them must be farmed for their meat as most of their fleeces are discarded or used for very basic by products such as packaging or insulation.
I bought the British Wool Marketing Board’s guide to British Sheep (see further reading below) and I soon realized that many breeds which are unique to the UK risk dying out because there is no demand for their wool (there aren’t enough processing plants where the shorn fleeces are washed and cleaned once they have been shorn). I couldn’t quite believe that instead of using our native wool, the British mills are paying a premium – not to mention the contribution to our carbon foot print – to import much blander, more uniform wools from the other side of the world, without addressing the huge potential of our own more sustainable and culturally rich material.
Sustainable British Wool
Once I saw what kinds of wool that were available in the UK I was fascinated by the huge variety of breeds – more than 60 and all so different to each other; from the long curly fleeces of the Teeswater sheep who have been farmed on the same land since the 1890s, to the fine white wool of the Ryeland flocks whose wool has been used to make cloth in Britain as far back as the 12th century.
The wool used for the original Norfolk Gansey jumpers was a Yorkshire worsted which was twisted together to make either a 3 ply or a 5 ply yarn which produced compact, medium to lightweight jumpers. In Sheringham the knitters prided themselves on the fineness of their knitting – which meant that the stitches were smaller and flatter so that they looked like they had been knitted by machine in a time when mass production was still new and exciting. In my collection, I have set out to achieve more of a chunky “hand knit” weight for the garments because I wanted to make the knits look more “hand crafted” in an age when the personal touch is valued once again.
I really wanted to make a product where the material and the process were 100% traceable because I feel that we live in a time where if the provenance of a product – be it meat, palm oil or wool – is not transparent to the consumer, then it probably does have a negative impact on our planet, its people or wildlife in some way. I fell in love with the story told by the British Wool Marketing Board in their short film documenting the journey their wool takes – from the sheep shearing through to the spinning.
I am very proud to be able to show you these images of the two breeds of sheep: Bluefaced Leicester and Masham whose wool has been used to make the British Wool in my collection and also to be able to use the British Wool trade mark on the pieces in my collection which have been knitted in wool.
