Ash, talk to me about the history of knitting
do you know what’s really interesting? how old most of knitting isn’t. also we don’t know a lot about it because women, because textiles, because wool decomposes surprisingly quickly
we know that there was a craft which the vikings called nalebinding (that’s supposed to have strange diacritics i can’t do) which involves working loops of yarn into a fabric with a single large blunt darning needle - we know the ancient egyptians did it, and the romans, but we don’t really know where it started and how it spread, and the same technique is also used in south america and seems to be almost as old. like drop spindle spinning, this is probably something that was so obvious to people working with fibre that it sprung up a lot of places around the same time independently.
for reference, the oldest nalebinding we have preserved is an egyptian sock, and it’s about 3rd century ce. we have no idea how recent the technology was then, or how long the vikings were doing it, because deserts preserve clothing and clay doesn’t and so far we haven’t found a bog body or tundra mummy wearing socks - but given that every time we do find a bog body or tundra mummy textile historians have to go “holy shit we were centuries out on this technology, humans had figured out multi-colour pattern weaving hundreds of years before we thought they had!” (actual example) i’m going to go out on a limb and say a really long time. we’ve been doing this for a really long time.
then, skip forward a thousand years and you’ve got two needle, multi-coloured knitted textiles from the middle east preserved in spain, and we have no idea what happened in the mean time. afgan or tunisian crochet, which involves working stitches onto and off of a long handled hook, is sometimes thought to be the ancestor craft of knitting on needles, but we just don’t know.
all of europe is knitting by the 14th century. they figure out knitting in the round before they figure out purl stitches. earliest known purl stitches, as well as earliest known lace knitting, are - get this - eleanor of toledo’s red funeral stockings. i’m not a fan of grave robbing but when the italian government decided to exhume all the medicis and re-bury them sans-clothing, they did costume historians a massive favour
fair isle - stranded colourwork - develops in scotland in the 18th century, i don’t know about the scandinavian equivalent but it’s probably about as old. did the two evolve independently? did they influence each other? we don’t know.
cables don’t get invented until the early 20th century
knitwear is very popular in the ’20s, and knitting is super popular - but by modern standards, rudimentary - well into the 60’s. and then it declines, until the 00’s when it comes back in a big way, and we invent a whole lot of seriously revolutionary stuff
so, basically, the technological advances made in the last hundred years are greater than the thousand years of knitting before it. but i hate purl stitches too, so i don’t blame them
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