No Single British Knitting Tradition: Shetland Lace, Fair Isle, Ganseys and the Written Pattern

Shetland: lace, trade and the value of a thousand stitches

The earliest complete knitted objects recorded from Shetland come from a 17th-century grave at Gunnister: a stocking, gloves, a purse and two caps buried with a young man. They are a small but unusually vivid group of surviving things. They do not prove that knitting began on the islands at that moment; they show what archaeology has so far preserved and what a single burial can tell us about clothing, material and skill. By the beginning of the 18th century, Shetlanders were trading hosiery with Dutch and German merchants. Coarse stockings and blankets moved alongside finer work, and knitting was part of the islands’ economy rather than a timeless pastime set apart from commerce. [1]

Shetland lace grew in a different moment. The V&A places its expansion in the 1840s, after transport links with the mainland improved. Islanders encountered fashionable lace articles and adapted what they saw to local yarn and technique. On Unst, wool plucked by hand from the neck of sheep could be spun exceptionally fine. That yarn made light shawls possible, but delicacy was not effortless: a single piece might contain thousands of stitches. The celebrated wedding-ring test—drawing a shawl through a ring to demonstrate its fineness—turns the object into a spectacle of smallness. The museum record adds a less romantic measure: the women who did this painstaking work earned little for the time it demanded. [1]

The construction is distinctive too. Rather than beginning with a long cast-on edge and working straight across, Shetland lace can begin from one stitch and grow outward, with its edges worked on the bias. It is a useful reminder that “lace” describes more than a decorative hole: the direction of growth, the balance of increases and decreases, the border and the finishing all shape the fabric. A museum label can identify the maker, date, place and material, but a photograph alone will not reveal an exact stitch count or recover an unpublished chart. The record for Amy Johnston’s 1935 shawl at Baltasound, Unst, gives a named maker and a date; it does not give permission to invent the missing pattern. [1]

Fair Isle: an island, a technique and a later fashion

Fair Isle is a small island between Orkney and Shetland, not another name for the whole Shetland group. The V&A notes a familiar origin story: Spanish sailors stranded after the Armada in 1588 supposedly taught islanders the colours and motifs now associated with Fair Isle knitting. The museum presents this as legend, not established fact, and also points to evidence of Scandinavian design influences. The honest account leaves room for contact across the North Atlantic and North Sea rather than assigning a complex visual language to one dramatic shipwreck. [1]

Nor did the now-iconic jumper exist unchanged in the distant past. The island’s earlier knitters made stockings, caps and scarves; sweaters in what is recognised today as Fair Isle style appeared around the First World War. Their horizontal bands commonly work with two colours in a round, carrying the unused strand across the back. Motifs such as crosses, diamonds and eight-pointed stars repeat within those bands. The method asks for an even tension: pull the carried yarn too tightly and the fabric puckers; leave it too loose and floats can snag. Pattern, yarn and the movement of the hand are inseparable.

During the 1920s, the style became fashionable well beyond the island. The Prince of Wales wore a Fair Isle jumper for golf, helping to make the look visible to a wider public. That moment did not create every older colour or motif, but it changed the market in which the island’s knitting was seen. The V&A’s collection record identifies Annie Thomson as the maker of a 1997 Fair Isle jumper. Her name lets one garment be read as a made object, not an anonymous emblem of an island. It also gives us a precise counterpoint to the wider fashion story: a technique can travel while particular pieces remain tied to particular hands. [1]

Names in the record—and the work left unnamed

One name in the Shetland story is Amy Johnston, recorded by the V&A as the maker of a 1935 lace shawl from Baltasound on Unst. Another is Annie Thomson, credited with a Fair Isle jumper made in 1997. These names matter because they connect a regional style to particular acts of making. They do not mean either woman invented an entire tradition. The distinction between a maker, a designer, a pattern writer and a later collector is easy to lose when objects are summarised under a place-name.

Other records preserve different kinds of labour. An 1886 illustration shows a woman knitting as she walks, but gives her no name. In the Yorkshire Dales, an 1814 account describes a Wensleydale woman called Slinger walking three miles to market at Hawes with the family’s weekly knitting, continuing to work while she shopped and returning with enough yarn for the next week. The account says she could finish a pair of men’s stockings in a day. This is a named anecdote in a period source—not a measurement of every knitter’s output, nor a complete portrait of the women whose work supported rural households. [1]

The records of published patterns introduce another set of names. Jane Gaugain’s 1840 book used a complicated system of symbols for stitches; the notation was not adopted by every author. In 1908 the yarn company J&J Baldwin hired Marjory Tillotson to write patterns for its Beehive series, but her name did not appear on the leaflets. Reading these histories together makes authorship more precise: a regional stitch vocabulary might be collectively developed, a garment might have a named maker, and a commercial leaflet might depend on a writer whose contribution was not credited on the page. [2]

The gansey: a garment built for the coast

Along Britain’s coasts, fishermen’s jerseys and ganseys answered a practical problem: how to keep a working body warm in wind and spray. The V&A dates the gansey to the end of the 18th century and describes tightly knitted wool, a high neck and close sleeves. Knitters measured the garment against the wearer as they worked, aiming for a close fit that held warmth. Guernsey and Jersey had their own related history of knitted stockings and waistcoats; the name “jersey” itself comes from the island. The museum suggests that the Guernsey may have been modified into the gansey, but that relationship should remain a proposal rather than a single, settled origin story. [1]

Decorative patterning later became part of the gansey’s identity. Stories say a fisherman’s home village could be read from the motifs on his sweater. The V&A cautions that this may belong partly to knitting mythology: some patterns were inherited or devised locally, while others may have become “regional” because early researchers recorded them in one place and helped fix them there. Patterns also travelled through work. Seasonal herring workers—often called the herring girls—followed the fleet around the coast and could carry techniques from one port to another. A map of motifs, then, is also a map of labour and movement. [1]

Even within the category, there was no single template. The museum describes Cornish knit frocks as often plainer and ribbed, possibly because the commercial hand-knitting trade there concentrated on garments rather than stockings and favoured speed of production. Machine-made sweaters eventually became cheaper and widely available, reducing the place of hand-knitted fishermen’s garments; interest rose again during the hand-knitting revival of the 1970s and 1980s. The object below is Amanda Slater’s own gansey in progress, photographed in 2018. It is a contemporary making record, not the V&A’s 1980 Staithes gansey. [1][8]

From spoken instruction to the printed pattern

Before patterns became standard household reading, knitting knowledge often passed from one person to another by watching and doing. A knitter could sit beside an experienced maker, learn where to turn, increase or decrease, and keep a favourite stitch in memory or on a scrap of paper. This did not mean that written instructions were absent; it meant that the page was only one part of the teaching system.

The V&A identifies a pattern for knitting hose in a 1655 English book as the first knitting pattern published in English. It runs as one long sentence, shifts among words for knit and purl, and leaves out needle size, yarn weight and tension. Modern readers can attempt it, but its awkwardness is revealing: putting a hand technique into prose was itself a problem to solve. A school manual, Instructions on Needlework and Knitting, followed in 1832 with sock directions in several sizes and a small knitted sample. The Workwoman’s Guide (1838) addressed economical clothing and furnishings, offered practical patterns and explained yarn, needles, casting on and off, and stitch variations. Its advice assumes that makers will adapt a motif to the garment they actually need. [2]

Gaugain’s 1840 symbols were one attempt to make a pattern concise, not a universal code adopted overnight. Her surviving book lets us see how unusual that notation looks on the page. In 1888 Weldons began publishing Practical Needlework; in 1906 it introduced short stitch abbreviations that became standard. Yarn manufacturers also issued leaflets designed for their own materials, turning a pattern into a link between designer, spinner, retailer and home knitter. Commercial publishing could make instructions widely available, but it also shaped what counted as fashionable and who received credit. [2][5]

The story is not a straight march from “primitive” oral teaching to “modern” print. Knitters continued to share instructions with relatives and friends even as magazines and yarn companies expanded. An old chart can omit a gauge because its reader is expected to judge the fabric; a newer leaflet can specify yarn and needles because its maker wants a predictable result. Today’s reader benefits from knowing which kind of document is in hand. Ask when it was written, who it was for, what materials it assumed and which details it leaves to the knitter. [2]

A short timeline

1. 17th century. A grave at Gunnister preserves Shetland’s earliest complete knitted finds known to the V&A. [1]
2. 1655. A long, difficult English-language instruction for knitting hose appears in print. [2]
3. 1838–40. The Workwoman’s Guide and Jane Gaugain’s knitting books contribute different forms of written guidance and notation. [2]
4. 1840s. Shetland lace knitting expands after transport links improve. [1]
5. Late 18th century onward. The gansey becomes associated with fishermen and sailors along the coast. [1]
6. 1888 and 1906. Weldons publishes Practical Needlework and later introduces short stitch abbreviations that become standard. [2]
7. 1920s. The Prince of Wales helps popularise the Fair Isle jumper as golf wear. [1]
8. 1935 and 1997. V&A records identify Amy Johnston’s Shetland shawl and Annie Thomson’s Fair Isle jumper by maker and date. [1]

Read the place, the object and the maker together

These histories resist a single national motif. Shetland lace emerged through fine local yarn, transport and a market that paid its makers poorly. Fair Isle developed through regional colour and pattern, then reached a new public through 20th-century fashion. Ganseys joined close-fitting construction to coastal work and a pattern vocabulary that travelled with people. In the Dales, knitting could accompany a walk to market; in print, a stitch might move from a long sentence to a compact abbreviation.

When you meet a “traditional” British pattern, look for the particulars beneath the label. Which island or coast? What date does the object record give? Is the image a historic garment, a modern example or a museum display? Who designed it, who knitted it, who wrote the instructions—and whose name is missing? A more careful answer does not diminish tradition. It gives the people, materials and choices that made it a history.

For a wider view beyond the regional examples here, the V&A’s companion histories trace hand-knitting and the changing sweater form. [3][4]

Sources and image credits

Numbered citations refer to the museum and historical sources below. Image captions link to each file record, license and image URL. The English feature is an editorial adaptation written for DDUJA KNIT; it is not a sentence-by-sentence translation.

1. Knitting traditions of the British Isles and Ireland · Victoria and Albert Museum
2. A short history of knitting patterns in Britain · Victoria and Albert Museum
3. The history of hand-knitting · Victoria and Albert Museum
4. A history of sweaters · Victoria and Albert Museum
5. Jane Gaugain, The Lady’s Assistant for Executing Useful and Fancy Designs in Knitting, Netting, and Crochet Work · digitised edition
6. Julian Paren, Fair Isle knitwear at the Shetland Museum · CC BY-SA 2.0
7. Woman walking and knitting, from Britta (1886) · public-domain file record
8. Amanda Slater, Fisherman’s “Gansey” · CC BY-SA 2.0
9. Jill Robidoux, Knitted Lace shawl – detail · CC BY 2.0
10. Clemensfranz, Shetland Museum, Lerwick · CC BY-SA 3.0