Reading Stitches

Just over a week ago I spent two delightful days examining Yorkshire Dales gloves in two different museums; the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere, and the Dales Countryside Museum in Hawes (where I was accompanied and assisted by my wonderful sister). Altogether I examined 9 pairs of gloves and, as I anticipated, two days was not long enough to get all the photographs and meticulous records that I wanted for my research. So I have arranged return visits. Nevertheless the two visits turned up exciting discoveries about the gloves.

One of my intentions was to work out what construction scheme was used for the gloves, and as all but one of the pairs were knitted by the same person (Mary Allen of Dent), I expected to find a lot of similarities in the construction from one pair to another. I was very interested however to discover just how much similarity in construction method there was between Mary Allen’s gloves and the earlier George Walton glove from 1846. In particular I was intrigued to find that both Mary Allen and the knitter of the George Walton gloves varied the increase technique following the same scheme. Increases at the outer edges of the gloves used the method I call a ‘lifted increase after’ (knitting into the stitch two rows below the last stitch knitted), whereas the thumb gusset increases are formed from a two-colour kfb (knitting into the front of a stitch with one colour, then into the back of the same stitch with the other colour). This and other interesting similarities have convinced me that the knitters of these gloves were practising a very specific glove knitting method that they had learned from an established body of knowledge, ie a taught knitting tradition.

Several other discoveries surprised me. One was that in all the gloves we examined Mary Allen had stranded the background colour below the foreground colour throughout her gloves, the opposite of what I do. Another discovery was that she invariably completed the thumb before continuing up the hand. Again, the opposite of what I do.

Possibly my favourite discovery though was that Mary Allen used more vibrant colours than I had previously thought. In the E. S. Curwen pair the grey-looking yarn that I had thought was maybe originally natural white turned grey through leaking dye from the black yarn, or from dirt, was in fact originally turquoise. How wonderful it is to be able to look inside gloves!