PieceWork January/February 2015

Enjoy this 9th annual historical knitting issue!

We embarked on devoting one issue per year to historical knitting with the January/February 2007 issue. Each issue has provided a glimpse into the rich, centuries-old, and sometimes poignant history of this beloved craft. We’ve met fascinating people and explored knitting skills that are quite simply beyond the extraordinary.

These issues provide us with the opportunity to learn about those who wielded two or more metal, wooden, bone, or ivory pins, sticks, or needles together with yarn or thread to create a textile. The tradition continues.

In this issue, Nancy Bush describes her discovery of “Eesti Tanumüts: A Symbol of Estonian Nationality” (tanu, “coif” or “bonnet,” + müts, “hat”). In “A Crown Prince, a Knitted Sweater, and Escape from Nazi Invasion,” Laura Ricketts tells the story of the “ski trip” that wasn’t for three-year-old Crown Prince Harald of Norway. Carol Huebscher Rhoades designed her project based on sweaters found in the Myrbergsgården Museum in Vörå, Finland (“Sweater Traditions from Finland: Vörå-Inspired Arm Warmers”), so that they “can serve as a wearable gauge swatch” for making a traditional Vörå sweater. And in “Fashion for All: Garments Knitted from Wool Yarn in Elizabethan England,” Lesley O’Connell Edwards cites a 1583 letter from Richard Hudsoun to Sir William Heyrick in which “Richard asks William to have a purse with a lock hinge made for him from a pair of worsted stockings.”

These are just a sampling of what’s in store for you in this issue. So here’s to our ninth annual historical knitting issue and to 2015.