Modern Crafters Rediscover an Old Sweater
Young people have been picking up fiber arts such as knitting in recent years, spurred by social media trends and pandemic-era boredom. Knitting forums now feature young crafters not just rediscovering traditional patterns but reinventing them for modern times.
Take the gansey sweater, a staple of 19th century British fishing communities—once a symbol of practicality and hard work, now the inspiration for numerous popular and fashionable knitting patterns. The gansey was a product of industrialization and exchange, the very things that grant modern knitters the leisure time to create this garment for pleasure rather than practicality.
Traditional ganseys were knitted with a strong wool yarn to produce a very tight and dense fabric. These factors helped keep “the wearer warm in the face of the coldest days,” noted Di Gilpin, co-author of The Gansey Knitting Sourcebook, in an interview with Nomadic Knits. Certain design techniques—such as leaving the more damage-prone lower half of the sweater plain and easy to remove—were used to allow ganseys to be easily repaired.
But ganseys were more than just practical garments, Gilpin argued: “The Gansey, in all its complexity and beauty, represents the harmony between the utilitarian and art.” Relief patterns representing ropes and anchors nodded to the seafarers who wore them, and knitters added their own creative touches stemming from their family or geographic backgrounds.
“The kind of wool needed to make relief patterns stand out,” as on gansey sweaters, “is fine, machine spun worsted,” explained knitting writer Penelope Hemingway on
Article from Reason.com
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