THE COLOURWORK jumper pictured
opposite, now part of the knitwear
collection at the Shetland Museum and
Archives, was originally purchased on
Fair Isle in the summer of 1913. It was
bought by a Church of Scotland minister,
Reverend Robert Logan, and his wife
Annie. The sweater was knitted from
handspun yarn and dyed with natural
dyes; such jumpers were made for sale
to tourists from the late 19th century.
According to the museum’s curator,
Carol Christiansen: “The patterns are
typical of traditional Fair Isle of this
period, although it is atypical for
garments from Fair Isle to have the same
pattern repeated... The jumper may have
been purchased for the Logan’s son and
eldest child, John Black Logan, who was
a petite boy and eight or nine years old
at the time. He later donated the jumper
to the museum.”
The Shetland Isles are a group of
islands off the north-east tip of Scotland.
Hand-knitting has existed there for more
than 500 years, reaching the islands from
mainland Scotland around 1500. By the
19th century it had evolved into high art,
combining sophisticated colours and
motifs. This stranded colourworkknitting is often called ‘Fair Isle’ after
the small island to the south of Shetland.
In 1856, Miss Eliza Edmonston, in her
book Sketches and Tales of the Shetland
Islands, wrote about the islands’
colourful knitting, and suggested it was
influenced by the shipwreck of a Spanish
Armada ship, El Gran Grifón, in 1588.
The romantic folklore suggested that
sailors from the wreck had shown
locals how to knit the motifs. Yet these
patterns, although ‘exotic’ to the
Victorian eye, have little in common
with 16th century Spanish textiles.
The more prosaic reality is that trading
with Scandinavia was more likely an
influence, or the Baltic - multicolour
knitting from that area was probably
copied by English knitters, as well. And
the decade when Miss Edmonston wrote
her book was probably roughly the time
when this art form was developed. There
are records of dyes being imported into
Shetland from 1840 onwards.
Shetland knitters worked in the
round, typically using a knitting belt.
Structurally similar to an English gansey,
these jumpers were knitted up from the
welt, and the sleeves down from the
shoulders. Patterns are geometric andoften symmetrical; sometimes they
are figurative, such as the fir trees and
snowflakes in this jumper.
Later Fair Isle garments often
alternated large motifs with ‘peeries’
or small motifs; sometimes, to unify
the design, the same peerie motif was
repeated but the large motifs varied up
the body of a jumper. At earlier dates,
every band of pattern was different.
The practical reason for stranded
knitting is that it carries more wool into
the garment and traps an insulative layer
of air between the stranded work; making
it warm and potentially harder-wearing
than a jumper made from a single strand.Sources of colour
This jumper is striking - and typical of
an earlier one - for its colours; a primary
palette of red, blue and yellow with
cream and a deep indigo blue/black.
Pre-1860, dyes were natural, and
although the jumper dates from 1913,
it was still naturally dyed, possibly red
from madder, blue from indigo or an
indigo-woad blend, gold from local
plants like ragwort, bistort, or the
historic dye, weld. The yellow here
may well be faded, but looks to be less
saturated than the acid yellow typically
obtained from weld - so I’d suspect a
local plant or even a lichen, as is used
to dye Harris Tweed.
Woad and indigo are chemically
identical, but woad can be less fugitive
(colourfast) than indigo. Often, by the
19th century, the two blues were mixed.
A blue/black would be a challenging and
skilled colour to make, naturally. Indigo
or woad would have to be fermented, and
maybe overdyed with, or dyed over, one
of the Scottish traditional black dyes like
darach - oak bark fixed with copperas -
or seilastair (iris root). Some natural dyes
would be local, others imported - just as
on the mainland.
After aniline (synthetic) dyes were
invented in the late 1850s and the 1860s, MAIN^
PH
OTOGR
AP
H:^
TT^
/^ ISTO
CK
/^ GETTY^ IMAG
ES^PLUSShetland Jumper
Penelope Hemingway investigates the
history of a handsome Fair Isle sweater held
in the archives of the Shetland Museum
HISTORIC KNITTING ARTEFACTS – PART 5
The jumper, now in the
archives of the Shetland
Museum, was purchased
on Fair Isle in 1913The Knitter 38 Issue 154 Subscribe now at http://www.gathered.how/theknitter