Knitting tales
Penelope Hemingway explains the history behind her ‘Hetty’ shawl
This is not a traditional hap structure, but was inspired by the Lancashire cotton and woollen mill girls and women of the 19th century, so needs a small explanation.
I wanted to make a workaday shawl (a ‘hap’), and was inspired by the practical, warm-looking, brightly coloured shawls of Lancashire mill workers of the 19th century. But these shawls were woven, not knitted. So I was looking for a way to knit a warm, functional shawl for everyday use, with the bold, geometric design of the woven shawls. And whilst I like the Scottish haps, I wanted to give myself a bit of a challenge with the shawl’s structure.
Then I remembered: years ago, I found a pattern for knitting a perfect square, which intrigued me. It was taught to spinner and knitter Anne Campbell, in the 1960s, by her mother-in-law, who “was told it by an old lady at the cotton mill in Lancashire where she worked as a girl doing cotton reeling. She said that when the thread broke or was knotted and tangled, they were allowed to bring home the pieces of cotton. These she unravelled and knitted or crocheted into blankets or tablecloths…”
!‘SPIN OFF’ MAGAZINE, WINTER 1993, p.88"
The pattern for the Lancashire square was intended to use up small scraps for patchwork, but because it gives a nearperfect square, I wondered whether I could adapt this traditional Lancashire recipe for a square by enlarging it for the centre of a hap. I made a number of squares, figuring out a sort of formula, so I could change the number of stitches cast on; I then tried to make increasingly larger squares, to see if my algorithm still worked.
The beauty of using a Lancashire square as the basis for a shawl is that the large central pattern is worked from the outside, inwards - which means you are constantly decreasing, rather than increasing. It seems to make the knitting go faster! The central section is knitted flat, then the seam is sewn up to form the square.
The border and edging are then knitted on from the live cast-on stitches around the centre square, as in the later 19th century ‘English style’ haps. Enjoy.