This article is translated from
《The famous Icelandic sweater with a round coquette Loareuja: the history and method of knitting》
Written by Irina
Source: www.livemaster.ru
Around the 9th century, the first settlers came to Iceland from Norway. They crossed the Atlantic in open-top boats and carried sheep and other livestock. Since then, trade in sheep, wool and wool products has been active. The oldest knitwear found in Iceland is a simple knitted wool mitten dating back to the first half of the 16th century. These mittens were discovered during archaeological excavations at Stola Fort, south Iceland.
The first Icelandic Bible, printed in 1584, confirmed that weaving was a well-known craft at the time. Knitted garments have been used as a medium of exchange since 1582. There is a theory that knitting was introduced by English, Danish or German merchants, but no one knows when or where this happened.
The conditions for the development of weaving traditions can explain a lot. In the process of the spread of knitting throughout the country, Iceland entered the so-called "long night", which lasted from the end of the 14th century until the middle of the 19th century. It became a colony of the Kingdom of Denmark and was territorially and economically isolated. Life is extremely hard, and foreigners crossing Iceland are terrified by what they see and the poor living conditions.
Due to its location in an area with high seismic activity, the country is often hit by natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Thus, the eruption of the Laki volcano in 1783 claimed the lives of 20,000 people, which was essentially a rupture of the earth's crust, which was 24 kilometers long, with more than 100 craters, lasted for more than 6 months, and claimed the lives of 20,000 people, which is almost a third of the country's population. Thousands of cattle died, and over the next two years, Icelanders lost 70% of their livestock. It's hard to say how the inhabitants survived these events, but by the 18th century, Iceland's population had plummeted to 40,000.
The most obvious reason why knitting has been able to take root and spread so quickly is its versatility and practicality compared to woven weaving, which requires more complex material handling, tools, and space to handle. Another equally obvious reason is the abundance of raw materials.
Knitwear is for both own consumption and export. Around 1624, more than 72,000 pairs of stockings and 12,000 pairs of mittens were exported. It can be knitted by both men and women. On dark winter nights, everyone gathers in a room next to the fireplace to weave and listen to ancient legends read aloud. The windows were small, and the fish oil lamp was dimly illuminated, almost blind.
"When you're four, you should start working. You have to learn three things: reading, spinning, and knitting. This paraphrase is an old folk song that children should be knitting from a very young age.
From the age of eight, children wear a pair of socks a week, which is considered an appropriate norm. A maid can knit a pair of stockings a day, as long as she is not disturbed. Two maids working together can make four sweaters a week. They sit opposite each other and put a sweater in a circle. After knitting, the clothes fall off and become denser and warmer. The week before Christmas, work is in full swing because everyone wants to buy new clothes for the holidays. Those who don't have it may be eaten by Christmas cats, which are big and scary animals mentioned in legends.
It is most often knitted using fine knitting needles, 1 mm or even thinner. On an adult sweater, up to 800 circles are made, and more than five knitting needles are woven into circles. Those that are not in use are stored in special wooden cases that resemble pencil cases. They are usually engraved with the name and date of the owner, and occasionally verses and motifs.
Most often, they are woven with yarns of natural colors, but those who are able to do so decorate elegant clothes with embroidery or colored yarns. Rich people wear clothes made of silk, velvet, etc., and stockings are also common.
The National Museum of Reykjavik has eight books on hand-painted embroidery and woven design. The oldest of these is from the 17th century. Two of the eight books have patterns suitable for weaving.
The actual appearance of the export knitted sweater has not yet been determined. No one survived. This is not surprising, as these are likely the rough monochrome sweaters of the European working class, which were ruined when worn out. The unique properties of Icelandic wool may have contributed to the popularity of this garment abroad: it is very warm and waterproof, but also very light. According to the director of the National Museum of Iceland, they are woven with a simple yarn of the same color. Old photos sometimes show people wearing solid-colored sweaters with elastic bands as their only decoration. In general, Icelandic knitting traditions do not create extravagant patterns, nor will we see masterpieces, but Icelandic knitting is very practical.
However, very few Icelandic knitwear has been preserved. But those that can be seen in museums are particularly interesting.
For practical reasons, men's gloves usually have two thumbs. These are work gloves where the thumb fails earlier than anything else. When a hole is formed, the mitten can be turned to the other side and continue working. Unused fingers were stuffed in. There is no difference between left and right, worn on both hands. The fisherman's mittens were noticeably more knitted, tucked in slightly, and continued to be stuffed in while working in the sea. The cuffs are not long, and it is easy to throw mittens off your hands when working. Motifs in the form of crosses are often used as amulets on the sea.
Modern gloves are woven with coarser yarns than before. To weave vintage patterns, you need to maintain the correct proportions and reduce the number of rings. The pattern now uses one loop compared to four (2 x 2) before.
Knitted insoles with an eight-pointed star pattern are called rosaleppar. They are woven with garter stitches on two knitting needles with a certain pattern. Children learning to knit start with striped insoles sewn with garters.
Insoles and knitted stockings with soft shoes made of cowhide, sheepskin, seal skin or fish skin. The length of the journey can be measured by the number of sexual partners. It may take seven or more couples to travel several kilometers from farm to farm. Until the 20th century, these soft shoes were worn daily by both men and women. Now it is only used in folk costumes.
The knitted jacket or peysufot is a simple, everyday form of traditional Icelandic women's clothing. Its name comes from the sideeye, a dark blue (later black) cardigan woven with stockings stitching. An interesting feature is its shape.
This jacket is seamlessly woven and follows the lines of the female body. There is a short slit in the back. The shoulders of the body are raglan and the waist is narrowed. The combination of reduction and increase shapes the chest and elbows. The shape is so well defined that the jacket cannot be placed evenly on a flat surface. Small blue or black hats with long silk tassels are called skotthufa and are worn as a set. Today, both items are usually sewn from cloth.
The Icelander said, "Sheep are vital to our survival. In the centuries-long struggle for the right to live on this inhospitable island, they are our most important source of resources, food and clothing, and protection against harsh weather. Iceland would not be inhabitable without sheep. ”
Sheep are an integral part of Icelanders, an animal associated with pure nature, hard work and perseverance. The rhythm of life in Iceland is determined by sheep farming: lambing in spring, hay harvesting in summer, sheep slaughtering in autumn, and wool processing in winter.
Modern Icelandic sheep are direct descendants of sheep brought to the island by the Vikings. It is a Nordic short-tailed breed that flourished in Scandinavia and the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries. Over time, there have been many attempts to improve Icelandic varieties by crossbreeding with other varieties. All this ended in failure due to the appearance of diseases brought by "fresh blood". As a result, all animals produced by the crossbreeding were culled and the overall impact was reduced to zero.
It is now illegal to import any sheep into Iceland. It is improved through selective selection of the variety itself. Genetically speaking, Icelandic sheep today are the same as they were 1,100 years ago. Perhaps this is the oldest and purest variety in the world.
Icelandic sheep medium size. The wool color is usually white, but there are 27 different sheep
shades: from sand and cream to silver-gray, dark brown and black. This powerful wool impact swayed on the slender legs, like a beautiful face, completely free of wool.
The climatic characteristics of the island - strong winds, high humidity, sudden changes in temperature - and its isolation are reflected in the formation of varieties and the quality of wool.
The coat consists of two layers, the rough toga and the thin body (Thel).
Tog is the outer layer of wool that protects sheep from adverse external influences: wind, dust and rain. It is a shiny, slightly wavy, strong long fiber (up to 45 cm long) reminiscent of mohair. Fineness 25-27 microns. Since it is covered with a layer of lanolin, the wool will not get wet and water droplets will roll down from above, leaving the sheep almost dry.
Tel is the inner layer that protects sheep from cold and drastic fluctuations in climate. This is a very fine, soft and short fluff with a fineness of no more than 10-11 microns.
Due to the small shearing volume (1.8-2.3 kg), only 15% of which is suitable for high-end knitwear, Icelandic wool cannot be used for industrial production. Used in the manufacture of yarns for hand knitting (usually a mixture of toga and tel, fineness 10-27 microns). The high quality of wool makes it possible to make soft hats, slippers and various accessories.
The breed is world-famous for its wool, but in Iceland it is mainly raised for meat, from which more than 80% of Iceland's sheep income comes from.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Iceland underwent tremendous social changes. In the end, political independence was obtained. New technologies have changed the Icelandic way of life more than any other country. In just a few decades, living conditions have become too good to be described. Hand-knitting as a family industry began to decline, men stopped knitting, and women continued to weave as a hobby. However, although knitting began to lose ground, it was still included in the primary school curriculum.
In autumn, the sheep are gathered into a large flock, from which each owner chooses his own sheep to take away for the winter. This process lasted for several days, and a large number of not only farmers but also spectators gathered. In the end, it turned into a grand celebration.
Previously, the lopi was called combed wool, stretched into thick threads for further spinning on a spinning wheel. When textile production was first mechanized, wool was made into roving in factories and then returned to farmers to roll up at home. In some cultures, this roving bag is called "cheese" because of its shape that resembles a cheese head. The Icelandic term "lopi" refers to the line itself and its shape.
Unspun lopi is now often used for knitting, and it began in the 1920s. Then, instead of spinning roving to weave, an Icelandic woman tried to weave lopis without spinning and worked on a small manual machine, managing to weave a scarf for her husband. The experiment was successful, she documented it in a hand-knitted pamphlet in 1923, after which the method became popular.
Before World War II, it was popular to use Lopi Norwegian sweaters with wide stripes on the chest. The first Icelandic sweater with a pattern on the shoulder appeared in the late 50s, like a large collar. It's not clear when the first round yok appeared, but some people remember seeing it for the first time on the page of a Swedish knitting magazine in 1956. This sweater has a circular pattern of red, blue and white on the shoulders and is called the "Icelandic sweater".
A similar picture was published in the newspaper of the Icelandic Women's Federation in 1957. The same pattern appears in German and Danish knitting magazines and is sometimes referred to as Greenland Design.
Whether the Greenland beaded collar inspired Norwegian and Icelandic round yuk sweaters is debatable. On the one hand, beaded and knitted patterns and their arrangement have certain similarities. The style became known in 1952 after members of the Danish royal family were photographed dressed in Greenland's national costume during a visit to Greenland.
Greenland is the largest island in the world and is covered by a 3 km thick ice sheet. Winter here lasts 6 to 8 months. Only one narrow coastline is inhabited. The inhabitants of the island are Greenland Eskimos, or Inuit. Greenlanders live mainly by hunting seals, and they find large numbers of seals on shore. Seal meat can be eaten, and seal skin can be sold to trading companies or used to make clothes.
Beads have been a hard currency in Greenland for the past 200 years. As early as the 17th century, many whaling ships came to Greenland from the Netherlands, bringing milky white and blue beads from Amsterdam. Whalers exchange beads called sapanngat, or "glass coral," for seal skin, blubber, and whale oil. However, the beads were found in Greenland long before Europeans arrived with glass corals.
Greenlandic clothing has long used beads of all shapes and sizes. If fur, leather, tendons were and are functional for clothing, then beads have only one goal – decoration. In Greenland, the use of beads culminated in colorful overcollars, part of the evening gowns that make up the national women's clothing today.
Greenlanders make their own beads from usable materials such as bone and stone. They also cut small multifaceted beads from the vertebrae of small fish. They are stained red with blood, strung on narrow belts and worn like necklaces. Other common types of beads are made from the teeth of wild animals, such as rodents, seals, narwhals, polar bears, and certain whales. Objects with holes are seen as a beneficial symbol of female fertility, and beads are often worn as a means of protection.
With the advent of beads, the collar became larger and denser in decoration. Back in the middle of the 19th century, the collar barely covered the shoulders, and by the beginning of the century, the collar had grown to almost the elbow.
Traditional materials continue to be used now, but the most widely used beads are made of glass and man-made materials. While these imported beads were never cheap, they slowly but surely became part of the most colorful costumes women across Greenland wear for the holidays.
A large beaded collar weighs 1.5 kilograms, consists of more than 65,000 small glass beads, and takes two months to complete. Beads are strung together in a grid, a technique that is not unique and the same bead pieces can be found in many parts of the world.
Also interesting are Greenlanders' shoes. Known as kamik, these tall boots are sewn from seal skin with tendon threads and embroidered with lace and silk thread.
The patterned strip below is the thinnest multi-colored leather inlay.
The last photo is not a composite photo. In 2009, designer Peter Jensen presented his new collection at London Fashion Week. The response to this was numerous protests demanding bans on sales and expulsion from the market. Greenlandic women find it offensive and an invasion of national identity.
However, we have deviated significantly from the topic.
Even before the photographs of Danish families, the 1930 Danish-Norwegian film "The Eskimos" was released, a romantic love story about European and Greenlandic beauties.
The film was popular and many women were impressed. One of them was Norwegian historian, researcher and designer Annichen Sibbern. In 1929, she traveled around Norway to collect old traditional Norwegian motifs and published a collection that is still used by weavers outside Norway today. While watching the movie, she noticed the beautiful costume of the protagonist with the eyes of a designer, and the idea of transferring the pattern to the sweater came up, and she immediately sketched the pattern.
Annichen soon developed a round over-the-shoulder sweater, which she called "Eskimos." It was published in the progressive Norwegian women's magazine Urd and became an immediate sensation. The following year, she included it in her book Norwegian Strike Monsters.
Sweater "Eskimo" Annichen Sibbern.
She combines the old Norwegian weaving method with a simple graphic design that looks very modern. It was proposed to weave the body with two parts and join them together while weaving a round yoke. This means that this design was known and popular in Norway back in the 30s.
In 1928, the Scottish magazine The People's Friend published a popular knitting supplement under the title "New Fairs Island Design." At this time, the booklet published a description of modern men's and women's sportswear, and in this issue of the magazine there was a youth tunic "Heather" with an unusual colored yuke. The body is woven in a circle from bottom to top, then separated, and the front and back are separated to form a circular notch. The parts are then joined again, and a colored pattern is woven into a circle. Yuke was connected to other parts that had already been formed, and this design is still in use today.
At first, widespread patterns such as OXO prevailed, and in the 40s large star tree patterns became popular. They are 25 rows or more wide and are markedly different in design from Norwegian designs during World War II. This is very important because occupied Norway was an ally of Germany, and in this case the weavers of Shetland showed that they had nothing in common with Norway by choosing patterns. This pattern can comfortably blend vertically into the design to form a round yuker jacquard.
In the early 50s, new colors and new types of yarn appeared, hand-jacquard was time-consuming and expensive, but such a scheme was formed: the body was woven by machines, and only colored jacquard yuk was woven by hand. By the 60s, trees and stars had become a representative motif in Shetland design.
In 1952, another Norwegian designer, Unn Soiland Dale, saw a photograph of a Danish family in the window of a London store, also inspired by the beauty of the clothing. She came up with her own design and named it "Eskimo," probably borrowing the name of Annichen Sibbern.
All her friends in London were happy, and when the editor of Woman's Own magazine saw him, he asked her to write a description. When Dale brought her Eskimos back to Norway, she retouched them with richer colors, and the design became an integral part of Dale's large-scale commercial project to promote Norwegian knitwear.
So the idea came up in different places around the same time. Who was the first now can't be determined, is it really that important?
Literally, lopapeysa means sweater woven with lopis (peisa). In Iceland, lopapeysa first appeared as a commercial product to support the domestic economy and use local wool to counter the dominance of imported goods. Within a short time, lopapeys became popular and became a national symbol of anti-globalization. It is very rare for something to become a tradition as soon as it appears. In Iceland, everyone wears lopapeysa: practical, comfortable, warm, patriotic, in the 70s, lopapeysa entered the world market and became the most popular and best-selling brand in the world.
It is fully round knitted and includes the body and sleeves. From the beginning, lopapeysa was hand-woven and has always been so. Perhaps this is what makes Lopapeysa unique to other Yuke sweaters. Some argue that lopapeys should be woven with natural colors, despite the fact that the first lopapeys were bright colors, and natural tones remind Icelanders of a poor past. Another important difference is the thickness of the yarn. The thickness of the thread allows the sweater to be completely hand-knitted. Wool is also important – thick and light, thanks to the unique qualities of Icelandic sheep and the wool they produce.
In 1957, the Alafos woolen mill began producing nonwovens on a commercial scale. Although the cost-effectiveness of hand weaving has declined in many cultures, this noble yarn is fast enough to make hand weaving profitable.
Thirty-five years ago, the Hand-knitting Association was founded. It was founded by women who used knitting as a supplement to their household budget to promote the marketing and sale of knitwear. A few years later, a shop was opened selling goods related to the members of the association. Today, the store is a thriving business and a thoughtful local landmark. The busiest trade is during the summer months, when tourist traffic is greatest.
Every tourist considers it their responsibility to bring back the most characteristic national souvenir of the trip – the real lopapeysa. They say they flew away like a hot cake in season.
Luckily, we don't have to go to Iceland to get such a sweater.
Crewneck sweaters, although they look complicated, are not difficult to wear.
In terms of calculation, E. Zimmerman's percentage method is very good, that is, all sizes are calculated according to the main indicator - the percentage of chest volume, that is, 100%.
The bodice and sleeves are woven separately from the cuffholes. They are then attached to long round needles and woven into yuk. The easiest way to define its shape is to place three rows of descending rows between the pattern strips. For a person of average size, the height from armpit to neck is 25% of the bust. It is necessary to divide the depth into 3 parts. Until the middle, Yuke's weaving did not decrease. The first reduction is done in the middle. Weave a row like this to reduce: weave 2, 2 into a circle until the end of the row. The second descent is at a height of 2/3-3/4. In this row, 33% of the STS is in the rhythm of weaving 1, weaving 2. Finally, the third reduction - 2-3 cm from the neck, the rhythm is 1 face, 2 together, 2 together. If the pattern is in the form of colored stripes, it is convenient to do the reduction in this way, and then you need to guess the reduction line between them.
If the pattern consists of tapered segments, you can use the following methods.
Regardless, the number of collars should be 40% of the bust.
In traditional sweaters, buds are usually not knitted. In the description of the advertising brochure, he never said it, which even famous designers often overlooked. Weaving it is not difficult, especially since it significantly improves the fit.
After combining the body and sleeves on a round needle, a few more rows of shortened rows are required to form a new shoot, and only then a patterned yuke weaving is carried out. If the pattern allows, then you can make a few short lines between the pattern stripes in the middle of the yuk.
Some beautiful examples of inspiration:
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Author | Irina
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