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Knitting’s Convoluted History by Chaka Lucas

Imagine getting up and pulling on pantyhose made of ripstop nylon, or wrapping strips of wool gabardine from toe to knee before stepping into loafers. Imagine a world where all is woven, a world without nylons, socks, tee shirts, stretchy lingerie, sweaters, and sweatshirts. Unlike woven cloth, knitted fabric adjusts to a body in motion, Knits make our lives flexible.

Generations of people have worn woven clothing that did not move or stretch with them. Knights in armor wore woven woolen hose with seams that ran from crotch to toe, and were cranky enough to wage war for a country. (Riding breeches are still cut like deflated beach balls because woven fabric does not stretch as you straddle a horse.) Ladies have suffered through fitted linen slips that required corsets, brassiers like rocket nose cones, and panties the size of pillowcases.

Still, the question Is not “Why didn’t someone invent knitting sooner?” but rather, “How did anyone figure it out at all?” Weaving was on the scene in the stone age, way before knitting, because in the course of observing nature, lots of things lead you to think of weaving. Weaving is in bird nests and spider webs. Look at your folded hands, with fingers interlaced and palms down; you have before your eyes the inspiration for a tabby or a twill pattern. Perhaps you are sitting by the fire one prehistoric night, playing with a piece of sinew from dinner. You wrap it over and under the fingers of one hand and have weaving.

Knitting, on the other hand, mimics nothing in nature. There must first be loops on a stick, then a second stick to draw a new loop through each loop just before you drop it, crating a flat fabric structure that is flexible in every direction. This is genius, plain and simple. No wonder it took eons to figure it out; we are lucky to have it at all. But where did it come from?

Though we see examples of sophisticated woven cloth even before the Neolithic period, about 6000 B.C., nothing even resembles knitting until the late Iron Age (c. 400 B.C. – 1.B.C.) with a fragment of a needle technique for netting, most commonly known as nalbainding.

Nalbinding is a stretchy, looped fabric made by sewing loops of yarn through each other with a blunt needle. The basic nalbinding stitch is formed around the thumb and twisted during construction, so the stitches look like stitches knitted through the back loop. Each loop is sewn through one other free loop. This differs from offset meshes of regular netting, in which the ends of each mesh are looped around the threads of two separate meshes.

Nalbinding is technically a knitted fabric, odd though the manufacture may be. On closer inspection it differs from modern knitting at increases and decreases. Some things possible in nalbinding are unwieldy or impossible with knitting, so it is possible to distinguish shaped garments made by the two techniques. Ancient nalbinded items found include small bags, and garments that need to stretch and bend around odd shapes – usually feet and hands. Because such garments receive hard wear, the technique may be much older than the oldest extant examples. Nalbinding is generally considered the precursor to modern knitting and still plays a limited role in garment making, usually in a folk context.

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Chaka Lucas is a craft enthusiast who loves knitting, sewing, crochet, cross stitch, beading and more.
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