Two Knitted Socks in a Latvian-Australian Wardrobe: Reading the Apinis Collection
Calling an entire Latvian national costume “knitting” hides the work of its makers. In the Apinis family collection at Museums Victoria, two pairs of socks are knitted, while a vest and belt are woven and a handkerchief combines weaving with embroidery. These objects invite a more precise account of technique, authorship, place and migration. Both socks were made in Australia, though their patterns refer to Latvian regions.
Two pairs, two makers
Anita Apinis-Herman made the wool socks numbered HT 24804 in Melbourne around the 1970s. Museums Victoria describes their pattern as belonging to the Alsunga region of Latvia. Yellow appears at the heel, toe and top; orange, green and black form motifs on the leg. The catalogue gives a length of 560 mm and a width of 110 mm and uses the term “pearl knit.” That term is the museum’s description, not enough information to reconstruct a row-by-row pattern. A photograph cannot establish the needle size or exact stitch count.
HT 24827 tells a different story. It is a cream lace-knitted knee sock made in Sydney in the 1960s for a costume associated with the Nīca region. Although Anna Apinis appears in the object’s title, the museum’s description identifies Mrs Grinbergs as the person who knitted it for Anna. The person associated with wearing or owning a garment is therefore not necessarily its maker. The recorded dimensions are 560 by 100 mm. Its restrained colour and open lace surface contrast with the coloured Alsunga-pattern socks, but the catalogue does not provide a complete knitting instruction for either pair.
Reading the rest of the outfit without calling it knitting
The cream-and-black vest HT 24829 belongs to the Nīca outfit, but it is not another knitted garment. The museum identifies a woven structure and an embroidered border. Anna Apinis made it in Sydney in the 1960s; its recorded dimensions are 530 by 540 mm. Placing it beside the socks shows how a costume can bring together several methods and several hands. A regional style names a design tradition, while the catalogue’s maker and place fields identify the particular object’s Australian production.
Anna’s cream linen handkerchief HT 24828 offers a second comparison. Its woven ground and embroidery serve a different purpose from the elastic loop structure of a knitted sock. Museums Victoria records it as part of the Nīca costume, made in Sydney in the 1960s, and measures it at 535 by 535 mm. The distinction matters because a viewer can see repeated ornament in both objects yet still be looking at entirely different methods of constructing cloth and adding decoration.
The long red-and-white belt HT 24795 follows a Lielvārde-region design. According to its record, Anna wove it in Sydney in the 1960s on a belt loom using a pick-up technique. At 1490 by 70 mm, its proportions are far from those of the socks. The motif is made through the loom’s warp and weft arrangement, not with the loops of knitting. Calling the belt a knitted accessory would erase both the equipment and the skill documented by the museum.
Migration, tools and family knowledge
Dr Michelle Stevenson’s Museums Victoria article places these objects within a family collection of more than 150 items. Anna studied weaving in Liepāja, Latvia, in 1930 and copied traditional designs into notebooks. After the Second World War the family stayed at the Memmingen displaced-persons camp in Germany. Ervins designed a multi-shaft loom there, and people around the family helped build it. The family brought the loom to Australia in 1950. This is context for the family’s textile practice; it is not evidence that the loom made the knitted socks.
In Australia, Anna supplied material for Latvian national costumes during the 1950s and 1960s and taught weaving to her daughter Anita. The museum also recounts Ervins building a machine from scrap materials to unply yarn for weaving. Tools, patterns and skills travelled, but the work changed with the available materials and a new community. Attributing every object to Anna alone would flatten that history. The Nīca socks explicitly preserve Mrs Grinbergs’s contribution.
What these records can and cannot tell us
Of the five photographed objects here, two are knitted and three are woven or embroidered comparisons. Anita made the Alsunga-pattern wool socks in Melbourne; Mrs Grinbergs knitted the Nīca lace socks for Anna in Sydney. The Latvian regional names describe patterns and costume associations, not the places where these particular objects were made. Keeping maker, technique, date and location separate makes the small catalogue entries more useful.
All five pictures are photographs of museum objects, not AI reconstructions. Each caption identifies the object number, record, image file and reuse licence. The records do not establish a full knitting pattern, exact stitch count, fibre composition for every item, or a complete account of how each garment was worn. Those details should remain questions until further primary evidence is available.
Primary records and image rights
- Museums Victoria, HT 24804, Alsunga-pattern knitted socks
- Museums Victoria, HT 24827, Nīca lace-knitted socks
- Museums Victoria, HT 24829, woven and embroidered vest
- Museums Victoria, HT 24828, woven and embroidered handkerchief
- Museums Victoria, HT 24795, woven belt
- Dr Michelle Stevenson, A Latvian Weaving Collection: the Apinis Family
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International