The last major ethnic traditional influence on 1980s knitting is the development the traditional gansey took on the coast of British Columbia. (Though Eighties knitting was fascinated with ethnic traditional textiles generally, and books about knitting in Peru, China, and Japan were also published, the remaining installments in this series will discuss "new" influences on 1980s knitting.) In the nineteenth century a mission school teacher from Scotland showed her students how to knit ganseys. They learned the general idea from her and proceeded to reinvent it into a radically different type of jacket, soon to be known as "the Indian Sweater" (according to one Canadian poet, "No garment suits us better / For working in the cold") or, more generally, the Canadian sweater.
What made these sweaters "Indian"?
a. Since they weren't made in India they might be more properly described as Salish or Cowichan. What makes a sweater really Salish or Cowichan is having been designed and knitted by a member of that ethnic group.
b. The Salish and Cowichan people were accustomed to dressing in fur and leather, and did not share the British idea that sweaters needed to be as "fine" as possible. They knitted super-bulky snowproof sweaters of thick, quickly homespun wool. What mainland knitters seldom copied accurately was the extreme bulk and stiffness of the knitted fabric--on much of the continent, those would have been excessive anyway. A typical Salish sweater was knitted at three stitches to the inch, but from wool that most knitters would have knitted up to two or fewer stitches to the inch.
c. Even the parts of the sweater that didn't contain pictures were sometimes worked in two different yarns to produce that a heavy, snowproof fabric.
d. The authentic "Indian sweaters" were three-color designs: undyed black or brown wool, undyed white wool, and a heathered gray or beige wool made by spinning the white and colored wools together.
e. Influenced first by traditional totem images and then by what sold to visitors, Salish knitters usually knitted a big picture, usually of an animal, into each jacket. Traditional Salish animal images were stylized rather than realistic; this makes them much easier to reproduce in bulky knitting. Some traditional sweaters featured geometric patterns.
f. Some Salish sweaters were knitted as pullovers, though few people find them easy to wear indoors. Most opened down the front, and as the technology came onto the market, increasing numbers of Salish sweaters were made with front zippers.
g. Most authentic Salish sweaters also featured a distinctive style of collar. It could be described as a shawl collar but it's much closer around the neck than a typical shawl collar.
Was the Canadian sweater tradition the same thing as the Salish sweater tradition?
Of course not. As the style spread back east and south, knitters designed their own bulky two-layer jackets, with or without big cartoon-like pictures. Traditional geometric patterns from Fair Isle and Scandinavian knitting were often used. Bulky acrylic, as well as wool and other animal fibres, was so popular that Patons used to call its bulky acrylic yarn "Canadiana." Cotton, which absorbs moisture and thus doesn't turn snow as well as wool or acrylic, was less favored for winter jackets in Canada, but as people got used to the bulky sweater look, cotton pullovers became popular all over North America.
People who wanted to wear sweaters indoors as fashion statements more than "for working in the cold" tended to prefer that their sweaters not be snowproof, and as the style spread south, knitters were often inspired to make more elaborate, lifelike pictures with lightweight dyed yarn. At this point the category of "Canadian traditional" blurred into the category of "witty knitting," which was also madly popular in the Eighties. Fusion was very much an Eighties thing.
Like most U.S. knitters I've always been attracted to the fact that classic Canadian-type sweaters can be made with cheap, widely available yarn. If that yarn is either Red Heart or Canadiana, the sweaters will never look expensive, but they will look good--for their kind of thing--even if they've been fished out of the lake and machine-laundered, for many years. The only problem is that they are very very warm.
"Save the Whales" was the most distinctly Eighties sweater I ever made. The idea of a picture of an orca bordered by geometric bands is Salish. This particular orca does not have the traditional Salish shape; it was graphed from a photo in England, where the sweater was designed and sold in English wool yarns, and was a large man's size. (Oversized sweaters were an Eighties and Nineties fad.) My contribution was redesigning it in U.S. acrylic yarn to fit a medium woman's size. It passed the test for a Canadian-type sweater: when worn in falling snow, it formed a barrier between the crust of snow that stuck to the outside and the well insulated wearer inside. It also passed the test for an Eighties sweater, with its classic 1980s motif! I will never make another sweater just like this one but I will use other patterns from this collection of Eighties-to-Nineties designs in aid of the original charity...
These picture motifs are from Maine, actually. Pictures (and the chicken-wire stitch on the chicken sweater) were designed by Chellie Pingree.
Helene Rush published these and many other picture motifs for Maine sweaters while living in Maine. But she was born in Canada. The pictures, like the knitter, have crossed the border many times.
The shape of this square patchwork sweater was actually designed by a Canadian, Ann Bourgeois, and it's a classic, big, snowproof sweater with room for layers of lighter shirts and sweaters underneath. AB knitted her mandalas and I knitted mine.
Books to look for
1. Shirley Scott, Canada Knits, is an authoritative study of the history of the Canadian sweater. It is not a pattern book, though published patterns for many of the samples shown are easy to find, or used to be.
2. Patience Horne, Patons Book of Knitting and Crochet, is where to find some of them. Many traditional knitting patterns were circulated by yarn manufacturers; Patons sold a lot of yarn and patterns in Canada, and this book includes some vintage picture knitting patterns. (However, most of the knitted garments are designed to be made with lightweight yarn.)
3. American School of Needlework, The Great Knitting Book, includes those iconic Mary Maxim picture knits with the horse and the deer in knit-by-numbers realism.
5. Ann and Eugene Bourgeois, Fairisle Sweaters Simplified. Again, the book was not in stores in the Eighties, but the styles and colors were in the knitting magazines of the Eighties. In this case the wool, the knitters, and the idea of knitting fairisle stitch in chunky wool, are 100% Canadian Content.
6. Ironically, while Sally Melville may be Canada's best known knitter, she's not known for traditional designs. Though her first full-size book does contain several patterns for snowproof knits with two layers of thick wool and/or acrylic yarn, and some of them even look like waterfowl and maple leaves, SM's knitting has generally explored new or unusual techniques and this book's no exception. Several patterns in this book, including the cover sweater, are designed to be knitted in one color and then inlaid with woven-in contrast colors.
Blogspot is showing me the link but not the book picture. Anyway I'd like to try something new here...Amazon builds collection pages for popular authors. This link should take you to the Sally Melville book collection: https://amzn.to/2XgpQUA .
However...I hate to be a spoilsport, but...serious pattern hoarders will recognize a Sally Melville sweater as something that was still new, if not unique, after the Eighties. The rest of the world will not give a flying flip, of course, but if you were to tell me a SM design was an Eighties Sweater I'd laugh.
7. So, if you'd rather be more authentically Eighties than authentically Canadian...in the Eighties chunky picture knits were also identified with Maine, and relatively small and cheap pattern books printed in Maine and New England were selling well. And they're also becoming hard to find (and, at the moment of typing, to display on Blogspot). Incredibly, Amazon doesn't even show a page for Helene Rush's classic Maine Woods Woollies, sales of which in the mid-Eighties helped convince publishers that knitting pattern books were worth marketing. The two children's sweaters pictured above, with the moose and pine tree motifs, are variations on patterns in Maine Woods Woollies. Amazon does show a page for More Maine Sweaters, the 1987 sequel that applied the same knitted pictures to adult-sized garments, and for Head to Toe, a 1993 collection that applied them to accessories only.
8. Also popular in the late Eighties, growing into a real industry in the Nineties, was Chellie Pingree's North Island Designs company. The book series began with Maine Island Classics, which includes both the chickens and the boat motif shown above. According to Amazon the whole series is way overdue for reprinting, with most volumes "not available" and three-figure prices for copies of the volumes that are available.
9. Then there were the Huber family's Country Knits venture. Steve and Carol Huber started out with an antique business that sold Early American textiles. Carol designed sweaters with motifs inspired by their antiques. Most of the sweaters had a standard shape; the interest was all in the colorwork. Though the densely printed books always encouraged knitters to use up whatever scraps they had, the Hubers seemed to work with the Columbia-Minerva yarn company and their business seemed to decline with that company's. Only one of the original four books still has an Amazon page, and the price per copy shows that anyone who's kept a copy in decent condition expects a good profit on it.
Who knew those rather cheap and flimsy paperback pattern books would become so valuable? Though I'd never pay $700 for one pattern book it is worth mentioning that I once sold a single sweater I'd knitted from a Helene Rush design for $880.
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