Book review: Alice Starmore’s Aran Knitting

Aran Knitting, by Alice Starmore
Dover Publications, 2010 (224 pages)
ISBN 978-0486478425
$29.95 US
Buy from amazon.com    Ravelry link

This book is the long-awaited new edition of Starmore’s 1997 book of the same name, originally published by Interweave Press. Since used copies of the original edition were fetching in the hundreds of dollars, this paperbound reprint is welcome and a bargain.

There are four parts to the book – an introductory 50 pages of historical background on Aran Isle and Aran knitting; a 50-page stitch dictionary of cable patterns;  the pattern collection; and a concise but thorough guide to designing a traditional saddle-shoulder Aran sweater yourself. All the designs are available here as kits from Starmore’s Virtual Yarns.

The background on Aran Isle itself is interesting, but it’s the Aran knitting tradition that Starmore is most concerned with – she takes on the task of debunking the mythology of its origins, starting from a careful examination of Aran sweaters in museum collections. Her conclusion is that Aran sweaters are a development that can be attributed to a single knitter, who added what we think of as Aran stitch patterns to a traditional Scottish gansey. In a new preface for this edition, Starmore examines the original book’s impact and popularity of Aran patterns since its publication.

Aranmor

The dictionary of  60+ traditional Aran stitch patterns at the front of the book is presented from a design point of view – it’s nicely arranged by type, with big swatch photos, charts, and drawings demonstrating techniques needed to work the stitches. You won’t find tips for correcting mistakes or preventing problems like loose background stitches next to a cable, however.

The patterns

Let’s talk about the patterns, which are the real reason to buy this book. There are 15 designs here: 6 adult pullovers, 2 children’s pullovers, 3 ladies’ cardigans, 2 throws or wraps, and 2 hats – one for adults, one for children. Most, if not all, of the pullovers are suitable for, and sized for, men or women. There's a variety of gauges - yarn weights vary from fingering to Aran/heavy worsted. (Check the Knitfinder Starmore pattern index for details on all the patterns – just type “Aran Knitting” in the Location column search box.)

Killeany sweater & Galway hat

There’s nothing avant-garde about the structure of these sweaters. Almost all the pullovers are classic unshaped, saddle-shoulder designs worked flat in pieces and seamed. Eala Bhan is the only design with waist shaping, and only one, Boudicca’s Braid, is multicolored.

Really, the sweaters are canvases for an orgy of intricate cablework– and Starmore is masterful at this. The patterning may be bold and high-relief as in Aranmor or Na Craga, or gloriously intricate as in Irish Moss – but it’s always harmonious and well-arranged. Some of the designs have cables inspired by Celtic ornament, with its braids, knots and fretwork.

Maidenhair wrap in Virtual Yarns Hebridean 3-ply

Closed-ring cables

This Celtic cablework  is composed of closed loops, instead of traveling lines that have a beginning and ending, like traditional cable patterns. To work them, you increase several stitches suddenly in order to begin the loop, and decrease suddenly to end it. In her 1972 book Charted Knitting Designs [Ravelry link], Barbara Walker introduced this technique as “some really new ideas in cables.” She called them closed-ring cables, and invented and charted about two dozen patterns for them, including several with a distinctly Celtic look.

Two of Barbara Walker's closed-ring cable panels

Starmore calls these cables “infinite lines;” she devised her techniques for them in order to reproduce the Celtic ornament of her Gaelic heritage in several designs for The Celtic Collection (1992), like Cromarty. Three Aran Knitting designs, St. Enda, St. Brigid, and St. Ciarán, use these knotwork patterns to glorious effect.

Other designers have also worked with these loop cables. Like Starmore, Elsebeth Lavold used them to reproduce traditional graphic pattern – in her case, Viking runes and ornamental stone carving – in Viking Patterns for Knitting (1998) [Ravelry link].

Most recently, Melissa Leapman has devoted a whole book to them: Continuous Cables (2008) [Ravelry link]. Her book has an excellent how-to section, a very good pattern collection, and a stitch dictionary with almost 90 closed-ring panels, motifs and horizontal bands that you can incorporate into your own designs, all of them charted, with swatch photographs. Here are two sweaters from Leapman's book:

Cables & knots pullover

Entwined circles pullover

New and old editions compared

If you’re familiar with the 1997 edition of Aran Knitting, you will find differences. The Dover edition is revised to use Starmore’s currently available proprietary yarns, and there is new sizing for several of the patterns.  There are new photographs of many of the designs in the Virtual Yarns yarns (photos and styling are by Alice Starmore’s daughter Jade), so there is a mix of photos old and new. There is one new pattern – pre-publication publicity said there were two, but only one made it into print. (I wonder what the story is there?)

The patterns themselves have been revised to reflect the new yarns – in many cases gauges are slightly different from those in the older book. The yarns called for in the original edition are not given. Patterns with changes in the new edition are:

• Sweaters with sizes added: Aranmor, Irish Moss, St. Brigid, and Boudicca’s Braid each have one additional size added – smaller, in all cases. Na Craga has two smaller sizes added.
• Sweaters with slight gauge and size differences due to yarn change: Aranmor, Na Craga, Irish Moss, St. Enda, St. Brigid, Boudicca’s Braid.
• New design: There is one new pattern, Eala Bhan, a feminine, fitted cardigan in four sizes with elaborate cable patterning and a small shawl collar. It’s knitted in Virtual Yarns Hebridean 2-ply.

Killeany, Fulmar, Maidenhair and Sigil are unchanged. I’m not sure about the hat and throw patterns; they may have slight gauge differences as well.

One note about the yarn requirements: patterns call for so many balls and/or so many grams of the required yarn - no yardage requirements are given, and there's no list of the Alice Starmore yarns with their fiber content, put-up and yardage anywhere in the book. For that information, check the Knitfinder Starmore resources page.

Eala Bhan - new pattern for this edition

If you like to knit cablework, Aran Knitting should be on your shelf. Whatever you think of the text portions of the book – Starmore is not shy in her opinions, and you may not agree with them – the patterns are pure genius, and knitting a few of them would make you a very accomplished cable knitter.

Color knitting links & inspiration

The Knitfinder resource section is coming along slowly – I’m trying to build it into the be-all and end-all of knitting bookmark collections, so you can start there to find ANY kind of knitting info you happen to be looking for. I’m working on a color knitting resource page now and thought I’d share a few tidbits.

Nanette Blanchard’s blog Knitting in Color has been around since 2003, and it’s full of great information and inspiration for stranded color knitting. You’ll find tutorials, patterns, and lovely photos – Nanette lives in photogenic New Mexico. She’s self-published several how-to booklets including Stranded Color Knitting, Glove Knitting, and Mittens in Color. At left, one of her mitten designs – the lovely Tijeras mittens. Find all her booklets and patterns in her Ravelry shop.

Here’s a great resource from Nanette’s blog: a list of the best yarns for stranded color knitting, organized by weight and linked to their Ravelry pages. Yarns were chosen for their quality and wide color range. The list is a year and a half old; there are some new yarns that would be good additions, like St-Denis Nordique and Berroco Ultra Alpaca Light.

If you’re embarking on your first stranded color project, there are plenty of how-tos out there. There’s a list of the best here.  TECHknitting has a great tutorial series on stranded knitting:  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 as well as one on slip-stitch color knitting. If you’ve never been over to TECHknitting, you’ll be amazed at the wealth of information. If you learn better from video, the KnitPicks tutorial section is a good place to start. There’s a collection of colorwork tutorials, including stripes, intarsia, Fair Isle, and color theory. Here’s one showing different methods of handling yarns for stranded knitting.

My friend Janine Bajus aka Feral Knitter is a brilliant colorwork designer and teacher. Her 3-day “Design Your Own Fair Isle” class is scheduled for March 26-28 in Berkeley, California – I don’t know if there’s still space available. There’s also a one-day class in May at Web-sters in Ashland, Oregon.


Here’s a swatch I knit in her class; she teaches a simple swatching technique for evaluating color combinations. This swatch revealed one I hated (the green and yellow in the middle), and several I loved (red and lavender, red and mint green, olive and coral). And you’ll find great tips, patterns, and color inspiration on her blog. Janine’s Celtic Pillows (free PDF from Two Swans Yarns, a great source for Fair Isle yarns and patterns) are meant as a canvas for playing with your own color choices.

There’s going to be an “Around the World” section in the Knitfinder resources, and color knitting leads us right into that. Scotland, Norway, Estonia, Sweden, Turkey, Peru…all have their own color knitting traditions. You’ll find the whole world of color knitting at unionpearl’s Knitting Letters A to Z. Many photos, great writing on knitting traditions, lots of links.

Some more photo inspiration:

Swedish Bohus Stickning on Flickr (read more about Bohus here)
Annemarie Sundbo’s collection of Norwegian mittens, stockings and sweaters
Latvian mitten galleries – from a project associated with the NATO summit in Riga, 2006
Let’s not forget modern colorwork designers: Kaffe Fassett and Brandon Mably, Alice and Jade Starmore.

More to come when the color knitting page goes live. I’m behind on other work this week, so there will be no pattern roundup tomorrow – look for it again next week. I may move it to Mondays or Tuesdays so I have time to write the posts over the weekend.

Vintage Bohus

I spent last Sunday in Susanna Hansson’s Bohus Stickning class at Stitches West. What a great day! Susanna tells the Bohus story, with plenty of slides, shows off her collection of vintage Bohus garments, and gets you started on a pair of Blue Shimmer cuffs. For me, the highlight was the opportunity to see and handle the vintage garments from Susanna’s collection. Here are some photos – click to see closeups. From the 1940s, two designs by Anna-Lisa Mannheimer Lunn:

Blue Eskimo hat

Red Edge cardigan

See the unexpected touch of pink in the Blue Eskimo hat? That photo also shows the tiny gauge – look at the garter-stitch brim. These 40s designs have less of a modern following than the later ones, but I love the retro look of them. Rumor has it that a kit and pattern for The Red Edge is coming soon from Solveig Gustafsson. I’d wear that sweater often.

From the 1950s, three designs by Annika Malmström-Bladini (all from 1957):

 Tobak

Winter Haze (Vinterdis) tam

Lemon cardigan

Tobak (Tobacco) was a cowl-neck pullover with a plain body and color patterning on the neck and cuffs only.  And Lemon – that eye-popping chartreuse body color is quite true, on my monitor at least.

From the 1960s, designs of Kerstin Olsson:

The Green Wood (1960)

Myrten Grön tam (1964)

The New Azalea (Red Egg) (1963)

Mosaik jacket (1967)

And one last 1960s design, Karin Ivarsson’s Large Lace Collar tam from 1960:


The Bohus story is told in detail in Wendy Keele’s excellent book Poems of Color. (The book was recently out of print for a short period; it’s likely to go out of print again soon, possibly for good.) Briefly, it goes like this: in 1937, a group of women, wives of unemployed stone cutters in the Bohus province of Sweden, approached the provincial governor’s wife for help devising a home-based industry that would allow them to help support their families. The governor’s wife was Emma Jacobsson, a highly educated Austrian Jew who had grown up in Vienna and immigrated to Sweden when she married. She took on the project, and after a few false starts, settled on the production of handknit garments – sweaters, hats, mittens and gloves.

Bohus Stickning was born in 1939 and lasted until its closure in 1969. Emma Jacobsson herself was the first designer; just five others were hired over the entire 30 years. Hundreds of knitters worked for Bohus Stickning over the years. They were highly trained and well paid, receiving about 30% of the retail price; they were expected to produce perfectly-knitted garments, but were allowed up to 3 months to finish a sweater.

These were couture garments with a conscious fashion aesthetic. They were marketed as luxury goods; the sweaters sold for around $300 US in the 1950s in stores like Neiman Marcus. Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly were among the celebrities who owned Bohus sweaters. Emma Jacobsson fiercely defended the integrity of the brand through strict quality control (of  the wool, the spinning, the dyeing, and the knitting) and marketing techniques (high pricing, careful choice of sales outlets).

For more on Bohus Stickning, read Poems of Color. If you ever get a chance, take Susanna’s class – there’s nothing like seeing the garments in person, and being able to examine the construction methods. Here’s a link to an online article based on one of Susanna’s lectures – it appeared in Knitch magazine. Unfortunately Radiant Knits: An Enchanting Obsession,  the catalog for the 2009 Bohus exhibit at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, seems to be no longer available. [Edited to add: You can get it from Saga Hill Designs, the website of Wendy J. Johnson, who photographed the Bohus garments for the catalog. Thanks to Ellen for the tip.] That exhibit featured Susanna Hansson’s collection. There’s also a documentary film by Kjell Andersson, made for Swedish Television in 1999. The film is available from Schoolhouse Press – in fact you can order it together with Poems of Color at a 20% discount. There’s also a Flickr pool, with photos of some vintage sweaters I’ve seen nowhere else like this one and this one. Of course, there is a Ravelry group too, moderated by my friend ermabom aka knitsarina.

*Edited to add one more great online article: B is for Bohus, Revisited, an entry in unionpurl's Knitting Abecedarium.

As many of you know, some of the garments are now being reproduced in kit form by master Swedish dyer Solveig Gustafsson. Her yarns and colors are truly beautiful, and the prices are very reasonable. Just go to her website and feast your eyes on the designs she’s made available. Susanna has very generously translated the patterns into English, in return for which she encourages knitters to donate to Doctors Without Borders, in the spirit of Bohus Stickning’s original social support purpose.

I don’t have much to show for my morning of class knitting:
I’m pretty slow with two and three colors at a time on 000 needles. That’s the size I needed to get a gauge of 8.5 stitches to the inch.  The yarn is 50/50 merino and angora. I have to rip this and start over to get a nice cuff, but I plan not only to do that, but to go on and knit gloves. I think they’ll be beautiful.

**3/4/2010: Just uploaded the vintage Bohus photos to Flickr so you can see them even bigger. Click here

Review: The Haapsalu Shawl

The Haapsalu Shawl, by Siiri Reimann and Aime Edasi (translated into English by Maret Tamjärv)
Saara Publishing House, 2009 (184 pages)
ISBN 978-9985-9925-9-3
$60.00 – $65.00  US; 19 €  in Europe

If  Nancy Bush’s Knitted Lace of Estonia made you fall in love with Estonian shawls, nupps and all, you’ll want this book for your coffee table. Like hers, this book celebrates the history and traditions of the ethereal shawls from the Estonian resort town of Haapsalu on the Baltic. It was published in Estonia with the direct input of master Haapsalu knitters working today and financial support from the Estonian government and various cultural groups. The financial support shows – it is a positively lavish, well-printed book with many color photographs. 

The Haapsalu Shawl expands on the same territory covered in Knitted Lace of Estonia (Nancy Bush served as consultant and editor for this English translation) with more historical information and more stitch patterns. Wonderful period photos are scattered through the opening chapter on the history of these shawls, knitted for the tourist trade. One page pairs a photo of today’s master knitters seated in a row with their knitting, decked out in lace hats and aprons; below them, a photo of tomorrow’s masters – half a dozen young women from Haapsalu High School with their knitting – bodes well for the future.

Unlike the Nancy Bush book, which has 14 patterns with start-to-finish instructions, The Haapsalu Shawl has no actual shawl patterns in it. Instead, a short but detailed illustrated overview of traditional construction methods gives you all the information you’ll need to knit a scarf or shawl with the stitch patterns you choose from the stitch dictionary. Briefly, the traditional designs consist of a square or rectangular center section in stockinette-stitch lace with a garter-stitch frame, and a separately knitted edging which is sewn onto the finished center section. Square shawls may have a wide lacy border between center section and edging as well.

The edging technique is interesting. Unlike the sideways-knitted lace edgings of the more familiar Shetland shawls, Haapsalu shawl edgings are cast on along what becomes the outer, scalloped edge, and knitted toward the center. This 90-degree difference in the knitting direction creates a whole different look. Traditionally, the cast-on uses two strands of yarn, which makes a bold outline for the outer edge.  Edgings are worked in two halves and joined at two of the four corners (because the tradition predates circular needles, they were not originally worked in the round). There is no mitering of corners; instead, enough stitches are cast on to ease the edging around the corners. Edgings are usually garter-stitch lace, contrasting prettily with the stockinette ground of the center section. Nancy Bush's book suggests alternative, modern ways to knit and attach these edgings.

The technique section of the book is well-written – it tells you how to calculate stitch counts for center section and edging (adding the right number of stitches for corner ease), and specifies the right cast-ons and bind-offs to use, with illustrations. Very detailed instructions are included for sewing the edging to the body of the shawl. There’s also essential information on blocking and on the traditional yarns used. An explanation of the chart symbols used and an illustrated stitch guide round out the technique chapter.

Now for the fun part. Most of the book is devoted to stitch patterns. There are 120 of them; each gets a full page to itself, with a generous, high-quality swatch photo (white wool on medium gray background) and a nice big chart. No written instructions are included. Patterns are grouped into families, interesting because it’s easy to see how small stitch variations alter the look of the swatch. Many of them are nupp-free (nupps apparently are prized as proof that a shawl is hand-knit - knitting machines can't do nupps). There aren’t too many edging patterns – only 9, arranged three to a page to finish the book.

Sprinkled throughout are 22 finished shawls, artfully photographed in full color in varied settings, many in scenic outdoor locations that make me pine for a summer holiday in Haapsalu. Some are modeled by Estonian women of all ages – the acknowledgments charmingly thank “the fair ladies who model the shawls in this book.” The knitter is always credited, welcome evidence of the respect given their work, and thanks to the book’s thoughtful layout, the stitch pattern used always appears on the facing page.

Any lace knitter who’s completed a shawl or two will be able to use this beautiful book to knit a wide variety of square shawls or rectangular stoles, no specific pattern necessary. With a bit of experience, it wouldn’t be too difficult to adapt the techniques to triangular shawls.

The Haapsalu Shawl is available in the U.S. from Schoolhouse Press and Halcyon Yarn, and in Canada from Elann and Needle Arts Book Shop, among others. You can also order it directly from Hobipunkt in Estonia; shipping doubles the cost for a single copy, but it may be worth it if you’re buying more than one. They also sell traditional yarns used by the Haapsalu knitters.