history of knitting – Sycamore Cove Knitting

Knitting Together Faith, History, and Community: The Prayer Shawl Chronicles Series

October 15, 2024Cynthia Coe

Knitting is much more than crafting a beautiful piece of fabric. It’s about weaving together threads that, on their own, may seem ordinary, but when intertwined, form something greater—something full of meaning and purpose. That’s exactly how I view my series, The Prayer Shawl Chronicles.

While each book stands alone, much like individual strands of yarn, together they create a rich, interconnected story that spans generations, cultures, and the deep role of faith in our communities. My goal with this series has always been to show how knitting, community, and faith intertwine, much like the stitches of a prayer shawl, creating warmth and connection where it’s needed most.

In the first book, The Prayer Shawl Chronicles, we dive into the close-knit (pun intended!) relationships within a small church, where knitting isn’t just a craft—it’s a form of spiritual and emotional support. The women of the church use their knitting needles to form bonds, offer prayers, and express love.

The second book, The Knitting Guild of All Saints, broadens this view, taking readers deeper into the history of a community knit together by faith and a shared love of creating. The guild connects across time, showing how past and present come together to form a lasting legacy through their works of kindness, friendship, and artistry.

Finally, Knitting Through Time steps fully into historical fiction, weaving a tale that travels through different eras, illustrating how the act of knitting—and faith—has long been a thread that connects generations. It’s a tribute to those who came before us and the ways they influenced not just their world, but ours today.

I encourage you to read each of these books not only for their stand-alone stories but also to experience how they interlace into one powerful narrative of faith, knitting, and community. These are stories of people much like us, who find strength in faith and fellowship—and who just so happen to have a love for knitting along the way!

Happy reading, and as always, happy knitting!

Cindy

Cynthia Coe is the author of The Prayer Shawl Chronicles, a series of fictional stories woven together by the theme of human connections made through prayer shawls and the craft of knitting. Her newest book is her first historical novel, Knitting Through Time: Stories of How We Learned to Knit. Learn more by visiting her Author Page at this link.

How Did Knitting Become A Worldwide Craft? Quick and Fun History Lessons on How We All Learned to Knit

August 30, 2024Cynthia Coe

When you think of where knitting originated, you might guess the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, or some other cold place. But Spain and Egypt? Really???

Where did the beloved craft of knitting get started? When I first picked up a history of knitting, I imagined knitting began somewhere around the North Atlantic, like the Scandinavian countries. The word “knitting” comes from the Old English word *cnyttan,* which means “to knot.” This term is derived from the Old Norse word *knúta,* meaning “knot” or “tie.” Over time, the term evolved into the modern English word “knitting.”

Does this mean the Old Norse developed knitting? Nope. Western Europe got its knitting from the Spanish. History Lesson! Through a whole bunch of royal marriages, Spain got control of Belgium and the Netherlands in the early 16^th century. What does that have to do with knitting? The Spanish brought their culture – including knitting – to the low countries when they set up their courts and started a hearty trading economy between Spain and the low countries and the rest of the known world at that time. Spain ruled the waves during this time in history.

My book, Knitting Through Time, imagines how exactly all this knitting knowledge got from Egypt to Spain to Belgium to Britain to America. No one knows exactly how this happened, but yours truly used the power of historical fiction to take a stab at suggesting likely possibilities.

Where did the Spanish get knitting? History Lesson Number Two! The first evidence we have of knitting in human history was in Egypt, of all places. (Yes, it’s hot there, but they had wool and figured out how to make socks earlier than anyone else. Think “cold nights in the desert.”) And then…History Lesson Number Three!..in 711 A.D., the Moors of the Middle East and North Africa (including Egypt) invaded Spain. The Moors took their knitting with them and left a solid culture of knitting there with the Visigoths, eventually intermarrying with them to form the modern Spanish culture.

After writing this book, I felt I had left out a huge hole in the history of knitting that came from South America. Many of our luxury yarns now come from Peru, Uruguay, and other places in South America. Crafters in these countries have long, proud histories of gorgeous, advanced knitting techniques using high quality wool from sheep and alpaca they raise. So they likely developed their own knitting techniques, right? Nope. Spain again.

When the Spanish invaded South America (much like the Moors invaded Spain centuries before), they took their knitting with them. It’s likely that the Roman Catholic nuns who set up shop to teach the indigenous peoples European ways of doing things introduced the craft of knitting to South American peoples. While weaving with wool was widely practiced to make beautiful garments and household items in South America since the beginning of human history there, the knitting skills now widely practiced there came from the Spanish.

So the next time you think of knitting as a product of cold weather cultures – Norway, Scotland, Holland – think warm thoughts instead. The History of Knitting is all about Spain!

Happy Knitting Through History! Cindy

What is Nalbinding, and What Does It Have to do with Knitting?

July 11, 2024Cynthia Coe

At some point in history, humans learned to make fabric by forming loops with yarn or whatever fiber they had on hand. But this wasn’t knitting; it wasn’t crochet. It was an ancient craft called nalbinding.

Apparently, humans first learned to make fabric by sewing together animal hides, using crude needles made of wood or bone. For “thread,” they used animal fibers (wool) they rolled together to form a crude yarn. At some point, some clever person figured out how to make a stretchy fabric by winding loops of this yarn around her fingers, making a chain of loops with her bone or wood “needle.” That became the ancient craft of nalbinding.

Nalbinding in one form or another was done by humans all over the world. Forms of nalbinding have been discovered in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, the Asian Pacific islands, and among the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Apparently, the urge and need to make fabric out of a bone or piece of wood with a hole in the end of it, using a length of string of some sort was once a basic means of providing warmth, décor, and protection to a woman’s loved ones.

But how did knitting come out of this long history of nalbinding? No one knows. In my new book, Knitting Through Time, I make a stab at suggesting how this might have happened. We know that knitting was first done in the Middle East, so I came up with a plausible story of how someone with lots of time on her hands came up with knitting out of necessity, then spread this new craft far and wide. Is this “true”? You’ll have to read the book and decide for yourself!

However knitting came to be part of our cultures, I think we can assume that this craft was passed woman to woman, mother to daughter, friend to friend – just like many of us still learn to knit or learn more advanced knitting techniques. Last evening, in preparing to write this blog post, I sat down with a nalbinding needle, wool yarn, and numerous videos demonstrating the craft of nalbinding. Reader, I was an abject failure. Why? I needed a real person to show me how to hold the yarn, correct my obvious mistakes, and to guide my hopelessly untrained fingers. Sadly, I have no one to show me, in person, what I was doing wrong.

We pass on our cultures, our crafts, and the very essence of ourselves to our loved ones and to others in our communities through small moments of one-on-one demonstrations and conversations. I sincerely hope we all will keep knitting and other crafts alive through this long history of sharing our crafts, our knowledge, and our time.

Blessings, Cindy

Recommended Resources:

Nalbinding: What in the World is That? by Ulrike Classen-Buttner, available in English on Amazon at https://amzn.to/3Lkg3FT.

Bone Nalbinding Needle by Hearth and Bone, available at https://amzn.to/464uJCS.

Introducing “Knitting Through Time” – Book 3 of The Prayer Shawl Chronicles

July 2, 2024Cynthia Coe

How did human beings learn to knit? Historians have no idea! So I made up a whole book of stories -based on historical facts- to suggest how we as a civilization learned how to make fabric from two sticks and a ball of yarn.

Who invented knitting? No one has any idea. Knitting first appeared in Egypt, as far we can tell. It next showed up in Spain, then spread throughout western Europe and onto the Americas as Europeans settled and colonized the New World. But how exactly did all that happen? What’s the story?

Those are the questions I set about answering in my latest novel, Knitting Through Time. As a fan of early Christian history and of the “Desert Mothers,” I had to think these women could have had a hand in the development of knitting. After all, they lived in Egypt about the time knitting developed, had lots of time on their hands, and did in fact do a bit of crafting to support themselves. So of course, one of my main characters is an aristocratic woman from Rome, Seraphina, who goes out into the Egyptian desert (wearing a blue silk dress, servants in tow) and has a fortuitous accident that just might have invented our beloved craft of knitting. (She also grows spiritually by leaps and bounds and befriends one of the famous saints.)

The action of my novel also takes place in Toledo, Spain, as the Moorish invasion of this region almost certainly brings knitting to Europe. But how exactly did that happen? In my imagined version of history, a young Visigoth girl named Hilda learned about knitting after the Moors put her to work washing their socks. Her descendants then took knitting to Bruges, Belgium and beyond as the Spanish court set up shop in Northern Europe. From there, the Dutch knitters of the Netherlands may very well have taken knitting to New Amsterdam and the Americas. A storyline featuring Anna, a young widow begrudgingly living with a community of Beguines in Amsterdam, shows how she and her knitting needles ended up in what is now New York City. (Who are the Beguines? You’ll find out!)

And how is this all connected to the first two novels in the Prayer Shawl Chronicles? Remember Nan, the “Quiet One” in book one and a late addition to the Prayer Shawl Guild of All Saints Church in book two? She takes center stage in book 3 and tells us how she learned to knit at the famous Woodstock festival in 1969 and what happened next. She ends up in Amsterdam, Bruges, Paris, and Egypt, too! How? You’ll have to read the book.

Tying all these stories together is a fun twist I wove throughout the book. You won’t know exactly what it is until the last couple of pages. So if you read something in the book and think, “that’s weird,” stay tuned! It will make sense at the end. (And…pssst!…if you read the thumbnail histories in the very back of the book, you MIGHT get a glimmer of this mysterious twist I put in the book.)

As a history major at the University of Tennessee a long, long time ago, I absolutely LOVED writing this book. With all the new online tools available now, I could research all kinds of obscure facts easy, peasy and within moments. I have actually visited almost all of the locations in this book (Toledo, Bruges, Amsterdam, New York, Paris), so it was a pleasure to write a book that tied together all these journeys made over a lifetime.

I hope you enjoy reading my new book as much as I enjoyed writing it! If you’re part of a book club or church group, there’s Questions for Discussion at the end of the book. (I’m a former Christian education curriculum developer; it’s what I do.) If you’re a history buff, I’ve also included a section at the back of the book giving brief descriptions of what was going on at the times and places portrayed in the book, along with a discussion of the Desert Mothers and Fathers of Egypt and the Beguines of western Europe.

Happy Reading and Happy Knitting! Cindy

Women’s History and the History of Fabric-Making (Spoiler Alert: It’s the Same Thing)

April 11, 2024Cynthia Coe

Did you know that if you lived just a couple of hundred years ago – and any time before that – and you’re a woman, you would have spent much of your life making fabric? Yes, we as women still do much of the cooking and cleaning in our families, though the men in our lives and households do much, much more than they did prior to the 1970’s. We still cook, and some of us even enjoy it.

Many of us still enjoy making fabrics by knitting, crocheting, or weaving. We might enjoy sewing, making quits, or even making our own clothes. But up until recently in human history, the making of fabric was no hobby. It was work and important work at that. And if you were a woman, it would have been one of your primary occupations.

As I’ve researched the history of knitting for my next book in The Prayer Shawl Chronicles, I’ve discovered these truths, and it’s changed the way I look at fabrics. In our current culture, we barely give a thought to the fabrics we wear, use to bathe, sit upon, or trod upon. Yet someone made these fabrics. The raw materials came from some place, somewhere in the world. Someone – likely other women, working in not great conditions and for low wages – worked at the factories that turn out the cotton, synthetic, wool, silk, and all other fabrics we likely take for granted.

In my novels, you’ll see characters knitting for solace, for quiet time, and as an aid to spirituality. Yet in real life, women also knitted to survive the cold, to keep themselves and their families warm. I hope to convey this reality in my next novels, and I hope you’ll take a moment to appreciate all those mechanized and digitized looms, yarn spinners, and dying machines that means we as 21^st century women get to simply knit…for fun.

Interested in the history of fabric making? Here are my go-to recommendations:

The History of Fabrics and Cloth Making

Women’s Work, The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times by Elizabeth Wayland Barber (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1995).

Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World by Victoria Finlay (Pegasus Books, 2022).

The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World by Virginia Postrel (Basic Books, 2020).

Worn: A People’s History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser (Vintage Books, 2022).

Happy Reading! Cindy

Follow this blog for impending news of a new novel in The Prayer Shawl Chronicles!

Cynthia Coe is the author of The Prayer Shawl Chronicles, a collection of interrelated short stories about knitters and those they meet through knitting and sharing prayer shawls.

Be sure to check out my newly published A Prayer Shawl Handbook: Inspiration and Resources for Your Prayer Shawl Ministry, now available in paperback and e-book editions and included in Kindle Unlimited.

Yarn – It’s Fundamental to Human Culture

February 8, 2023Cynthia Coe

We’ve all seen the memes. “My other hobby is buying yarn.” “My yarn stash exceeds my expected lifespan.” “Yarn is like chocolate; you can never have too much.”

We treat yarn as if there’s an abundant worldwide stash ready for us to buy, in any amount. Craft stores literally stock enough yarn to reach the ceiling. You can obtain yarn for any project you have in mind with a couple of clicks on your phone.

This wasn’t always the case. In researching for my next book in The Prayer Shawl Chronicles, I’ve been shocked to learn how much time women have spent over the centuries making yarn and thread. Before industrialization, if you were a human being and a woman, you would spend a good part of your waking hours making yarn or thread. If you were a Neanderthal woman, you would have used fibers from the inner bark of conifer trees to make string for fishing lines and nets, to hang food to dry, to set traps for small animals, and to sew together animal hides for clothes and shelter. If you lived in Europe up until the industrial revolution, you would carry around a spindle and a fist full of wool, and you would make yarn while you watched the kids, walked, talked, and generally while you kept an eye on whatever else went on in your life. You would know how to work a spinning wheel as well as you knew how to cook. It’s what your family needed to survive.

Why don’t we study this in history class? Why don’t we see remnants of these time-consuming tasks featured in museums? Think about it – yarns, threads, and cloths eventually deteriorate and rot. These cushy, soft products don’t survive as long as items made of metal, stone, or even wood. So our foremothers’ efforts put into anything woven, knitted, or sewn have largely faded (or rotted) away from the saved artifacts of human culture.

The next time you pick up a skein of yarn to knit your next project, consider yourself blessed. Thanks to human ingenuity, all you had to do to get that yarn was click buttons on your phone or make a craft store run, which you probably enjoyed. Appreciate that you, as a 21^st century woman, have the leisure to simply sit and knit for the sheer pleasure of it.

Blessings, Cindy

Knitting Hasn’t Always Been “Just a Hobby”

January 18, 2023January 18, 2023Cynthia Coe

Knitting is just a hobby, right? A way to pass the time. Maybe a reason to get together with other crafty friends. Perhaps just a harmless and inexpensive thing you do while watching television.

Knitting hasn’t always held such a frivolous place in human lives. At many points in human history, knitting was serious business. If you were poor and needed money to feed yourself, you knitted. And you knitted socks, lots of them. You might knit every night until you couldn’t see the wool in front of you. You might knit every spare moment you found in your difficult and dreary life. Because you had to. Knitting was how you got by.

This past month, I’ve done a deep dive into the history of knitting. In preparing to write a new novel in the Prayer Shawl Chronicles series, I’m looking at why people – mostly women – knitted over the last decades and centuries. What exactly did they knit? How did they learn to knit? What did they use for needles? How did they get access to patterns? And my big question has been, what place did knitting have in the average woman’s life?

Several of the answers surprised me. Knitting used to be all about socks. The oldest found knitted garment was an ancient Egyptian sock. Up until the 1920’s, knitting continued to be a way to provide high quality socks to the aristocracy and others who could afford them. In more recent years, soldiers fighting one war or another (with wet, dirty, sore, and blistered feet) went through socks like there was no tomorrow. They needed the womenfolk back home to keep them supplied.

When you think of “handknitted garments,” the first items to come to the 21^st century mind might be “scarves” or “sweaters.” Socks are difficult and advanced projects for most of us. We’re just knitting to pass the time, remember. Up until Coco Chanel introduced us all to “sportswear” in the early part of the 20^th century, people generally did not wear sweaters – with the noted exceptions of British fishermen. Hard to imagine, right?

Enjoy your knitting. You’re very blessed to live in a time when you probably don’t have to knit. You don’t have to crank out a zillion pairs of socks just to put food in your children’s tummy. You probably aren’t knitting essential items for the military. You can afford to just knit because you want to. Sure, you may knit to economize and make an all-wool sweater that would cost a lot at your local department store. But you have that option. (And I bet you thoroughly enjoy making that sweater, too.)

But give a thought to those women who don’t have the option of “free time.” Give a thought to women who are working very hard, doing something with their hands, for the same reasons our foremothers knitted long into the night by candlelight to keep the soup bowl filled. Because, but for the grace of God, we all could have lived in a place and time when we knitted not for fun, but for survival.

Here’s my recommended books on the history of knitting in Britain and the United States. Both are beautifully researched and a pleasure to read.

This Golden Fleece: A Journey Through Britain’s Knitted History by Esther Rutter (2021)

No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting by Anne L. Macdonald (1990)

Happy Knitting, Cindy