Last week's post, Part I.1, discussed Eighties versions of the "gansey" sweater style. This week, we consider a form of the gansey that developed its own special tradition.
2. Fair Isle
Fair Isle is the name of one island in the Shetland group. Fairisle stitch is the style of knitting that developed there. In the Eighties there was considerable confusion about this.
Again, the concept of cultural appropriation does not exist in Eighties sweaters. Fair Isle has been exporting more fairisle knitwear to off-islanders, every year, than could possibly be worn by islanders.
To be a Real Fair Isle Sweater, it has to have been knitted by a resident of the island, on the island, preferably using wool that was produced on the island. Shetland sheep are a special breed. Their wool is softer than that of most sheep, and it comes in a wide range of soft neutral colors. Generally the colors are classified into nine groups, including what are called black, white, red, and blue. Compared with the colors of bleached and dyed materials these are brownish shades of black, white, red, and blue, but they make an interesting mix in the stripes and bands of multicolor knitting that constitute a fairisle stitch pattern.
There is or used to be a school of Fair Isle knitters who favor patterns knitted only with those nine shades of brown and gray that look like a flock of Shetland sheep. However, there's also a traditional school of Fair Isle knitters who favor bright mixes of dyed yarns. The oldest museum pieces are dyed; the softest, least scratchy fabrics are naturally colored.
Dyes used to be produced on the island with chemicals naturally extracted from solutions of native plant materials, purchased additives, and natural ammonia. The colors were intended to be as bright as possible, when new. The best preserved museum pieces show vivid primary colors.
In the twentieth century, as fairisle sweaters became fashionable, designers rushed to offer fuller ranges of aniline-dyed wools, and many knitters created bold, fresh patterns, adding bright purple and orange as well as trendy pastels to their combinations. These more recent designs were Real Fair Isles, but they were not always loved by the islanders themselves. At this period stores were demanding lots of sweaters that were "made by hand on Fair Isle" but were not paying the knitters well for them. Many knitters resorted to working on hand-cranked frames rather than knitting needles, and remember one or more family members grimly cranking and clattering away at meals so the family would be able to pay for the next meals. When researcher Ann Feitelson went to the (now oil-rich, but traditionally poor) island to interview the old retired knitters and designers, some told her they used to hate knitting.
The scanty wages Feitelson's informants remembered earning for piecework were a huge step forward for knitters on Fair Isle. When stores first began marketing ready-to-wear hand knitting, the store owners wanted to pay in barter only. What the stores had a lot of was clothing. Early visitors to the island reported finding knitters and their families "starving in finery."
Naturally any time-saving measure that produced results the customers tolerated was used whenever possible. Real Fair Isle sweaters were often knitted on frames as round pieces, cut, and sewn. Socks were made with clumsy seams rather than gracefully shaped toes. Yarns were twisted between every inch rather than between every stitch, so it's not uncommon to find the one-color part of a garment worked at 6 stitches to the inch while the fairisle stitch is worked at 7 stitches to the inch.
The first garments exported from Fair Isle predated the sweater fashion by several decades, and were caps, socks, scarves, mittens, and gloves rather than sweaters. When sweaters were knitted, the style was similar to the ganseys made in other parts of Britain, only with stripes and two-color patterns rather than textured patterns. Knitters agreed that the original idea was to use up leftover yarn, but knitters soon began planning perfectly symmetrical patterns.
The early sweaters were men's ganseys with long sleeves, diamond-shaped underarm gussets, high snug necks, and long waistbands. It didn't take long, though, for knitters to adapt their pattern stitches to trendier garment shapes. Fair Isle knits really became fashionable when the Prince of Wales had his portrait painted in a V-neck fairisle sweater.
What makes a sweater fairisle?
(a) First of all, if it was made in any other part of the world, including the other Shetland islands, it may be fairisle stitch but it's not a Real Fair Isle Sweater. Most Eighties fairisle sweaters were frankly foreign imitations, though some designers, like Ron Schweitzer, tried to follow traditional design rules.
(b) Fair Islanders knitted samples of every sweater shape that came into fashion. One can imagine that those who were knitting just to earn money were delighted with the 1950s' round-yoke styles, with plain one-color knitting up to the shoulders and only one long and one short stitch pattern to remember. If it could be knitted, at some point in the twentieth century somebody on Fair Isle probably had a contract to knit a few dozen of it. (They did not foresee a need for cell phone covers but they knitted little pouches and purses in suitable shapes.)
(c) Real Fair Isle sweaters were always made of lightweight wool yarn. Fairisle stitch works beautifully with chunkier yarns in cotton or acrylic, but such garments were not knitted on Fair Isle.
(d) Fairisle stitch patterns are symmetrical, usually simple geometric motifs. They were classified by the number of rows in a complete pattern. Some large patterns were repeated all over a garment, but this came to be seen as more typical of Scandinavian rather than Fair Isle knitting. Real Fair Isle museum pieces were striped in mixes of large and small patterns. Each pattern consists of just two colors on each row, but within the pattern these colors may change several times. The patterns were recorded on simple charts with plain and filled squares. The rule for producing the most distinctive designs was to work the plain squares on each row in stripes shading from darkest to lightest, and the filled squares in stripes shading from lightest to darkest, or vice versa. Larger patterns (nine rows or more) usually had an odd number of rows, with the center row often worked in an accent color like red, yellow, or black.
The original Fair Isle patterns were not pictorial, but pictures can be worked in fairisle stitch, and often have been--especially in Canadian sweaters.
Fairisle stitch is often worked with both hands. Although some knitters twist the two yarns between every stitch or at most every two stitches, the lightweight wool used in traditional Fair Isle knitting tends to stick together and was often twisted only every inch--every 7 to 10 stitches--for faster knitting.
Pattern books to look for:
* Sarah Don, Fair Isle Knitting. Bigger and better studies of Fair Isle knitting came later. This was one of the better collections available in the Eighties. All the charts and pictures are black-and-white and, as one horrified young reader exclaimed on Amazon, the patterns direct you to knit things in the round and then cut them open. This was one of the time-saving techniques the old Fair Isle knitters used; it works if you knit with 100% Shetland wool. Wool coheres, once knitted, in ways other yarns do not. Some of the styles have a Seventies look. (This book was first published in 1982; it's been reprinted by Dover and it's also available on Kindle. Some readers say pattern charts don't work well on Kindle.)
* Sheila McGregor, The Complete Book of Traditional Fair Isle Knitting. Again, it's still the 1980s; knitting is not yet booming enough that publishers automatically design knitting pattern books as expensive coffee table books. Despite relatively cheap production this book was authentic, respectful, and usable. It was first published in 1986 and is now available as a new reprint from Dover.
* Alice Starmore, Alice Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting. In the late Eighties and early Nineties this knitter brought out one dazzling coffee-table book of original designs after another. "When does Alice Starmore sleep?" wondered reviewer Carol LaBranche. The answer was, of course, that Starmore had spent years designing sweaters that made people remember her name, before interest in knitting boomed and publishers discovered that her name had magical effects on sales.
Few if any people have ever been disappointed by the look of any book by Alice Starmore, but some people have become discouraged by trying to knit up her patterns. They tend to be labors of love. Knit them for people who will make good models, and snap lots of pictures; you'll want to relive, and brag about, the experience of knitting these designs for many years to come.
* Ann Feitelson, The Art of Fair Isle Knitting. Though only a few of these patterns were "previewed" in magazines before 1996, the book contains lots of historical material, including a pattern for authentic, bright-colored fairisle socks reprinted from an early twentieth century source. (Just for fun, I halved the stitch count and knitted them as an unmatched pair of bulky slipper-socks at 4 stitches per inch. They sold within an hour.)
* Ron Schweitzer, Appalachian Portraits. Ron Schweitzer (Amazon lists him as "Rob") specialized in designing nine-color fairisle sweaters for Yarns International, a Maryland store that imported naturally colored Shetland wool yarns. Though his booklets were printed around the turn of the century, they're an authentic part of the design tradition and will fit right in with Eighties sweaters.
About the colors...
In the Seventies, natural colors and "earth tone" dyes were the height of fashion. In the Eighties, we all realized that most people look better in pure bleached white, flat black, blue, red, and pink. In the Nineties, as natural sheep colors, brown, green, and orange had almost disappeared from stores, a few people began muttering insidiously about its being Green to "reduce our carbon footprint" by wearing undyed fabric, and designers became fascinated with those "urban camouflage" dyes. Part of what made Melania Trump look so exotic and impossible to follow, as a fashion leader, is her minority complexion; as a classic "Spring," she looks her best in all the colors most of us have learned to avoid.
As a colorist, I often knit and design with colors that I know will look better on other people than they would on me. It's not possible to have every finished piece in every size and color people want on a display, however big the display may be. Natural wools are easily damaged on a display. It's not easy to stock enough black, red, white, and blue things; it wouldn't be feasible to try to stock every style in a natural-colored wool.
I do enjoy handling natural-colored wool. Most knitters do. However, thousands if not millions of Americans are convinced that they're allergic to wool. Actually, they're allergic to the acid in which commercial wool is soaked and/or various other harsh chemicals used to dye and preserve it. Natural wool--especially Merino, Shetland, Iceland and even Ontario wool--can safely be wrapped around babies.
And I do consciously try to stock some things in "Spring" and "Autumn" colors. Eventually someone will pounce on these pieces squealing delightedly, "It's me!"--but before that happens I can count on a few other Springs and Autumns to say reproachfully, "It's not me." These days they even add, "You're behind the fashions! Why don't you have more contemporary, more fashionable, more ecologically conscious colors..."
I don't see sludgy, earthy colors coming into fashion in anything like the way they did in the Seventies, or like the way they went out in the Eighties. Those colors just don't look good on the majority of people, and by now most people know this. I don't mind knitting for a minority of people, or for one specific person, but I prefer that they not be tiresome about it.
Just about everyone can enjoy the secret comfort of a pair of natural wool slipper-socks that soften the dry skin while they warm the feet.
Most of us can choose between the coziness of a natural wool sweater that makes us look as if we'd been too ill to wash our faces for a month, and the compensating appeal of some other kind of sweater that suits our complexions.
A few people can wear the natural color of a light brown sheep, next to their faces, and look their best. Those people are very lucky. (Usually, for some part of their lifetime, their hair was red.) They should not spoil the effect by berating the majority of humankind.
If you are an "Autumn" who looks good in off-white, sepia, and brown, the dye-free nine-color fairisle look is for you. Revel in it. You get to wear softer wool, with a smaller carbon footprint, in aid of oppressed minority sheep, and have the colors harmonize rather than clash with your warm brown eyes.
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