When most people. arc confronted with the term 'knitting' they immediately think of Aunt Agatha's Christmas jumpers, in excruciating colours, the necks of which will not stretch over the head. This book is not about Aunt Agatha's jumpers. Knitting is one of the most important processes for producing garments and world wide represents a considerable and increasing percentage of the population's apparel.
Knitting is used to produce garments that cover every part of the human body, in a wide range of garment types from socks, caps, gloves and underwear to upper and lower body garments varying from T-shirts to formal jackets. In spite of this range, the treatment of the fabric to produce various garments and the properties of the garments produced have a great deal in common, and it is the intention of this book to explore that commonality.
This common theme is connected with the knitted fabric property of extensibility. This is in sharp contrast to the general rigidity of most woven fabrics. The industries dealing with the production of knitted garments remain separate from those dealing with woven garments, except for the overlap occurring with dresses, suits and other outerwear garments produced from jersey fabrics.
Within Government industrial statistics the firms producing knitted " garments are not classified as part of the clothing industry but as part of the textile industry. Nevertheless, in spite of the separateness of the knitted garments industry, within the fully cut sections there is a considerable sharing of production technique with the industry using woven fabrics, in pattern generation, lay planning, cutting, and production planning and organisation. Many hooks have been written about woven fabric clothing technology; a few mention some of the areas of overlap between woven and knitted fabric, but there are no books dealing with the particular and general. techniques of producing clothes from knitted fabric. It is the intention of this book to begin to redress the balance.
There are indeed very few books dealing with the industrial aspects of-knitting (see bibliography) and these tend to deal primarily with knitting machines and their 'products, not the subsequent processes that create garments. The primary production of knitted fabric is not dealt within this book, although an introductory chapter on knitted fabric structures is included.
There are many books covering hand-knitting techniques and the production instructions for creating garments. This is to be expected, for hand knitting is one of the oldest of man's construction techniques, and is also one of the world's most popular pastimes.
Hand knitting
Hand knitting precedes machine knitting as a technique by many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Its area of origin and time of invention are unknown. There is conjecture that the mountainous areas of Persia, now Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan were the origin. Similar claims have been made for the Holy Land, Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon; also the Atlas mountains of North Africa provide a likely site. These are all areas associated with the domestication of sheep, and the likely connection between wool fibre and knitting. Wool fibre, which is composed of protein, would decay rapidly in the sorts of climate associated with mountain areas. This would help explain the lack of early examples of knitting. Archeological investigation in these areas has tended to concentrate on the great civilisations, not peasant culture. It is also possible that references to knitting in early writings have been missed or misinterpreted.
In medieval Europe hand knitting was an important industry and socks, caps and knitted gloves were common products. Hand knitting had many obvious advantages, i.e. the simplicity and portability of the production apparatus, the lack of a cutting and making up process needed to complete a garment, knitted in the round (integral), the lack of complex finishing techniques, the simplicity of fit, and the stretch allowing various shapes and sizes of people to be able to wear one size of garment.
By the second half of the 16th century hand knitting had developed into an advanced craft, with stockings for the gentry and nobility being knitted from extremely fine silk threads on pins that were little more than fine wire. These stockings were usually richly embroidered and embellished with threads of coloured silk, gold and silver. The prices were very high and and the hose were regarded as the most important part of a gentleman's wardrobe. The lower orders wore stockings of worsted sun
wool or linen or hemp, knitted or bias cut from woven fabric.
Knitting machines
In 1589, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Reverend William Lee, a curate of Calverton in Nottinghamshire, presented himself at the Court of the Queen with a request for Letters Patent for his newly invented knitting machine. This machine was remarkable in many ways: it was the product of lateral thinking in that it used an entirely different method to produce a familiar product; it employed complex interacting motions unlike any other machine in existence; and it was arguably the first machine to concentrate on increasing the productivity of a process for its own sake (i.e. the start of the Industrial Revolution).
This first machine produced coarse knitting — peasant hose — and although it reportedly caused a sensation at Court and was the object of marvel, Elizabeth dismissed the application with the following words:
'My Lord I have too much love for my poor people who obtain their bread by the employment of knitting, to give my money to forward an invention, that will tend to their ruin by depriving them of employment, and thus make them beggars. Had Mr Lee made a machine that would have made silk stockings I think 1 should have been somewhat justified in granting him a patent for that monopoly, which would have affected only a small number of my Subjects; but to enjoy the exclusive privilege of making stockings for the whole of my Subjects, is too important to be granted to any individual'.
Under the patronage of Lord Hunsdon, Lee persisted and produced in 1598 a refined version of his frame, able to produce silk stockings. This machine contained, it is thought, 20 needles to the inch rather than the 8 needles per inch of the original. He still did not acquire the desired document from Elizabeth, or James I, and, enticed by the French envoy the Marquis de Rosny, he moved to France with his brother James, six frames and nine knitters. The frames were set up in Rouen and succesfully operated as a small industry.
William Lee stayed in Paris, where, after the murder of Henry IV, he was declared persnnna non grata. He died in Paris in 1610, destitute and in low spirits before his brother James could rescue him.
Knitting industry
James, on learning of the death of his brother in such lowly circumstances, removed the machines back to London where the changed economic and political climate enabled an active industry to be started, with people clamouring to be apprentices to the new pursuit. James made a modest profit from the sale of the machines, returned to Nottinghamshire and with Aston, a miller of Thornton, produced frames improved with Aston's invention of a fixed additional sinker bar.
The industry was now set for rapid and consistent expansion, lasting for 200 years until the slump initiated by the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic wars produced the first experiences of industrial recession (Thomis 1969.)
Such was the completeness of the frames conception that frames of virtually identical construction were still used in a productive capacity in Nottinghamshire in the 1970s, to produce shawls.
The industry during the 17th century developed as a typical Guild-organised cottage industry. The Framework Knitters Company, established by Royal Charter and based in London, regulated the industry in England and Wales but not in Ireland and Scotland.
The restrictive nature of the Guild system in respect of knitting become intolerable by the beginning of the 18th century, and moves were made to escape its strictures. Initially such moves were confined to the establishment of branches of the industry in Dublin and the Scottish Borders, but eventually they led to the breakdown of the Guild authority in the Midlands, aided by a Parliamentary sanction of 1753. During this period the Framework Knitters Company took legal action to attempt to control
the trade and move it back to London.
By 1750 the distribution of frames in the country was:
London 1000
Surrey 350
Nottingham 1500
Leicester 1000
Derby 200
East Midlands rural sites 7300
Other English towns and Scotland 1850
Ireland 800
A total of 14 000 - a considerable industry.
The 18th century represented two interconnected revolutions for the knitting industry, with a subsequent effect on the whole of the textile industry. The first was a spate of inventiveness that modified the frame. The second was the diversification of the product into articles other than hose. Both these trends led to rapid expansion of the industry.
Modifications to frames
The modifications of the frames were numerous and many inventions were aimed at circumventing the inventions of others. Most of the modifications and inventions occurred in or near Nottingham town.
Among the most important modifications were:
(1) the rib frame;
(2) selection devices to aid patterned loop transfers, including pin drums and jacquard's;
(3) the warp frame;
(4) selection devices to produce tucked fabrics.
These led ultimately to the evolution of warp knitting and of true twisted lace. Such expansion led to a shortage of yarn, particularly of the newly introduced short staple cotton. (The first cotton, from India, was knitted in Nottingham in 1730.)
First Hargreaves (1767)„ind then Arkwright (1769/72) set up their spinning mills in Nottingham. Both men were from Lancashire but were attracted to the Nottingham area by the demand for yarn, the availability of capital, the skill of local engineers and the theoretical availability of a workforce used to working with machines. What was lacking, however, was power. Watts' steam engine was invented in 1769 and was not available to Arkwright until much later. His Nottingham frames were driven by horse or mules: Hargreaves' machines were powered by hand. Felkin (1967) is of the opinion that, if the steam engine had preceded Arkwright's frame, the cotton industry would have been located in the East Midlands.
Arkwright moved to Derbyshire for water power and eventually hack to Lancashire where calico and Fustian weaving expanded rapidly.
Diversification of product
The diversification of the product was connected to the inventions: sometimes an invention suggested a product and sometimes a perceived market led to an invention. Such see-sawing was to become the characteristic of knitting industry development up to the present time.
The other associated characteristic, which is not exclusive to knitting but is more exaggerated than in any other industry, is the tendency to produce multiple solutions to one problem. This can best be explained in an example. At the height of the double-jersey/jacquard fabric boom of the 1960s, every knitting machine builder produced an exclusive, patented, needle selection mechanism to carry out the function of lifting needles to knit or leaving them down to miss. There were possibly over 20 different mechanisms available at the same time to carry out the same function.
Examples of this can still be found in electronically controlled V-bed knitwear machinery, where every machine builder has progressed along separate lines and produced different machines, computers and, most important, languages to deal with the same problems and functions.
This dates back to the mechanics and engineers in Nottingham (and Saxony) all trying to circumvent one another's mechanisms to produce the same product. It is said that Nottingham was the largest outlet in Europe for powerful telescopes and can lay claim to another first in industrial development industrial espionage! In no other industry is it possible to make a seemingly identical product by so many alternative routes.
The original purpose of the frames was to take advantage of the demand for hose. The wearing of hose (defined here as tight fitting leg covering) by men became firmly entrenched in Italy during the Renaissance, and rapidly spread to the rest of Europe. This fashion during the 15th century involved the wearing of what we would recognise as tights - close fitting garments enveloping the whole of the lower body from the waist downwards. Such garments were constructed from bias cut woven fabrics, or leather, but it is not impossible that sonic were knitted. They were called `breeches' and were often worn with `hosen' - short socks or lightweight hoots worn over the tights.
Later, as the fashion progressed into the 16th century, the hoses covered most of the leg and the breeches became ballooned shorts. This fashion was to dominate men's dress of all classes up to the start of the 19th century.
From approximately 1540 the hose were almost exclusively knitted. During the reign of Elizabeth 1, richly embellished hose became one of the most important items of men's dress. Contemporary accounts speak of men spending half their annual income on J single pair of hose.
I am sure that such commercial implications were not lost on William Lee, although he was not to benefit personally. William Lee's frame was flat and could therefore only produce flat pieces of fabric. These could he shaped at the edges and garments could he built up of several pieces to produce complexity of shape, or to remove seams from awkward places such as the soles of the feet. Essentially, however, the hose were seamed together by hand and were of the type that we now know as fully fashioned, with a main seam down the back of the leg. The hand knitters were not restricted to the flat form and could produce hose in the round
(integral garments).
After the wide introduction of Lee's frame, from 1620 onwards, hand knitting of hose diminished except for the very coarsest of articles. Nevertheless, hand knitting was still used to produce items like hats and gloves and possibly seamen's jumpers.
Tradition has it that with the break-up of the Spanish Armada, and the subsequent blockade of the English Channel, ships of the Armada headed northwards to round Scotland and head back for home via the Atlantic ocean. This part of the story is undoubtedly true as wrecks and founderings are reported all along the route.
The Spanish sailors carried their knitting skills with them and there are highly developed patterned knitting skills in all the seaboard places where the Armada ships could have called or foundered, including the Scottish east coast, Orkneys, Shetlands, Faroes, Norway, Iceland and the Irish Aran Islands. In the coastal ports of the North sea and North Atlantic, the upper body garments that we now know of as knitwear developed. They never became fashion in the widely worn sense of the word and were not, until recently, the objects of commerce, but they produced for fishermen and seamen essential items of protective clothing.
The product of the frame, i.e. the major output of knitting, was one type of garment - hose - until early in the 18th century when some diversification's took place; other garments, normally the province of hand knitting, were produced such as gloves, hats, scarves and shawls. These were essentially shaped garments made like the hose, either fully fashioned or integral.
There were other interesting developments. After the introduction of cotton into Nottingham in 1730 frame-work knitters began knitting lengths of simulated lacework using loop transfer techniques. Such 'point lace' created a boom, both in the commercial sense and in a spur to inventiveness.
Also over the same period other garments were made from knitted fabric, which was cut and treated in a similar way to woven fabric. Jackets, breeches and waistcoats are all items produced during this period of which there are examples in existence.
Later, in the period 1790 to 1820, such cut techniques when applied to hose to cheapen them were a major factor in the Luddite Rebellion in the Nottingham area. The knitters strongly objected to the implied productivity improvements, the subsequent lowering of reward to themselves and the lowering of the quality of the goods produced. A copy of their petition has recently been published (Knitting International) and provides a remarkable insight into the problems of the day.
The industry was also experiencing another unique event — a major change in fashion for men, away from the weaving of full hose to the wearing of trousers.
In the 19th century power was applied to the knitting machine, the first circular machines appeared, William Cotton's patent revolutionised fully fashioned hosiery production, and Matthew Townsend's latch needle enabled consecutive knitting and selection to knit and miss to take place.
The product diversified still further during this period and knitted underwear became a reality, followed at the end of the century by sportswear and swimwear (exposed underwear) followed closely by knitted outer garments (knitwear).
During the period 1880 to 1910 knitwear became established as an item of female fashion. The basic methods and division of production were established during this period and are still with us today. These basic methods are:
(1) Fully fashioned Knitting shaped portions of fabric in the flat;
(2) Cut stitch shaped Knitting of made to size portions of fabric, with some shaping introduced by changing of stitches;
(3) Fully cut knitted piece goods Lengths of fabric from which garments are cut in masses;
(4) Integrally knitted The shape is generated in the round during knitting, leaving little or no seaming.
Twentieth century developments
Development in the 20th century has largely involved increasing the productivity of knitting machines and making them more versatile in their patterning scope. The knitted garment is now established as part of everyday dress and most people, irrespective of age or gender, are usually wearing two or more knitted garments most of the time.
Fashion or society in its cycles sometimes decrees that knitted garments are the main form of clothing for females. The polyester clothes of the 1960s and early 1970s are an example, and the knitwear-dominated late 1970s and early 1980s are another. Such cycles in fashion prove concerting, if not plain disastrous, to the knitting industry. The industry contributes to its vulnerability by divisions into specialist sectors. Such sectors tend not to respond to fashion changes readily, either because of technical limitations and lack of expertise in technical and design development, or a complete failure to recognise market opportunity.
Some sectors remain aloof from fashion directly for long periods of time, but are subject to other trends. The manufacture of basic under-wear, for example, trades on the basis of a utilitarian necessity but is subject to pressure from alternative production sources, being ideally located in areas of low labour costs.
Even basic underwear is slowly subject to fashion changes and some-times itself evolves into fashionable items of clothing. The T-shirt that is currently ubiquitous wear all over the world evolved from vests.
There is currently a discernible trend in production techniques that may, over a long period, have important consequences for the knitting industry and its products. There has always been concern over the waste of raw material that results from cutting garment shapes out of flat materials. This can, in extreme cases, represent 40-50% of the whole.
It is recognised that knitting in the fully fashioned or integral modes enables the waste of value-added raw material to be largely eliminated. For a long time, however, the technology of knitting machinery has limited the range of garments that can be produced by these methods. Fully fashioned outerwear, for example, has long been confined to plain fabric with embellishments of stripes, loop transfer, tuck stitches and intarsia.
The advent of computer controlled V-bed knitting machines has changed the situation dramatically. The ability to fully fashion on a wide range of fabric types is now possible. Inhibitory factors, however, are:
(1) the added skills needed on the part of the designer and machine programmers to cope with the complexities;
(2) the increase in machine production time involved in making fully fashioned garments as opposed to cut stitch shaped.
This second factor is seen by most manufacturers as the biggest stumbling block because such decreases in productivity raise the proportion of the cost of the garment that is involved with the high capital value of the knitting machines and the fixed overheads. This is a highly debatable subject, balancing the savings on raw material and making-up labour costs against the loss of overall production.
The next step in this progression is to begin to lower the seaming content of the garment. Again, development of the latest computer con¬trolled V-bed knitting machines to include fabric controlling sinkers (Stoll SMC and Shima Seiki SES) allows garments to be integrally shaped by a wide variety of methods. Such developments have potentially more savings than fully fashioned. But there are inhibitory factors:
(1) the added skills needed of the designers and programmers;
(2) the consequent decrease of production from capital invested;
(3) the argument that a fault occurring during knitting damages a whole garment.
It is my contention, however, that production will move strongly in a progression, initially for knitwear but ultimately for all knitted articles, of:
Fully cut → stitch shaped cut → fully fashioned → integral
I am strengthened in my argument in that three garment types have moved along this progression successfully. These are half hose and hose, gloves and hats.
These principles will be looked at in a separate chapter devoted to integrally knitted garments.