beauty The of Fair Isle

Juliet Bernard explores the story of her favourite knitting technique, and speaks with leading designers working with stranded colourwork

FAIR ISLE knitting, often known as stranded colourwork, is a wonderful technique with a rich heritage going back hundreds of years. The basic principle is to create motifs by alternating two colours of yarn in each row. Some designs are traditional, having been handed down from generation to generation, but you will also see a growing number of patterns that take a more contemporary, graphic approach to raise this technique to the next level.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has an intriguing early example of a sock made using stranded knitting that dates back to the 12th century, which was found in Egypt and is made from cotton. During the Middle Ages, highly patterned knitted gloves were seen as a symbol of liturgical power. Ornate motifs in expensively dyed silks were stranded with silver-gilt yarns to demonstrate the high status of the wearer.

Family traditions

Today we use the term Fair Isle to describe the technique of knitting with colour on the island of Fair Isle and throughout the Shetland archipelago. There are different theories about how the islanders learned to knit in this way. One is that a Spanish ship was wrecked off Fair Isle in 1588, and the sailors who survived passed on their skills and motifs to the islanders. Or could it have been Dutch and German traders stopping off en route to the East Indies? There are examples of the stranded technique all across Europe and Scandinavia, so the trade routes obviously played a role in exporting this style of knitting.

Whichever theory you favour, stranded knitting was a vital source of income for crofters on the Shetland Islands. With husbands and brothers at sea for long periods of time, it fell to the women to earn money to keep the family going, as well as managing the family croft. Knitting garments and accessories was literally a lifeline, and knitters used patterns handed down from mother to daughter. When motifs were recorded as charts, they were simple black dots on a piece of squared paper, often with no indication of when to change colour.

Knitters would collect their yarn from wool traders and return the finished items to be sold. Even though the amount they were paid was very low, the income was hugely important.

Modern popularity

Fair Isle knitwear became hugely popular in the 1930s, when a portrait of the Prince of Wales was painted by John St Helier Lander, showing the prince wearing a stranded colourwork jumper knitted in rich shades. Sales of hand-knitted items from the islands soared.

The Shetland Museum in Lerwick has a fascinating collection of the most beautiful and complex examples of knitting, as well as an archive that is globally recognised. Susan Crawford’s work in The Vintage

Shetland Project has brought many of these designs back to life for today’s knitters, and her book also offers essays that help us to understand the history of the technique, the social fabric of the islands, and the origins of the designs.

There are many knitwear designers around the world today creating both traditional and modern interpretations of Fair Isle style, and I interviewed four of my favourites to discover why they love stranded knitting and how they work.