Quezi

Shawl with Shetland lace pattern. Photo by staralee - CC-BY

The most delicate Shetland shawls can indeed be pulled through a wedding ring.  Knitted in cobweb lace patterns, from finely-spun wool, a shawl 6 feet square (1.8 metres) may weigh as little as 2 ounces (57 grams).

To make one the traditional way, you need to know that the finest fleece comes from the sheep’s neck. Then you must  card and spin it with such expertise that the thread is “as fine as hair”,  according to the Shetland Museum. Women from Unst, the furthest north of the Shetland Islands, had the reputation of being both the best spinners and the best knitters.

Knitting a ring shawl took more than long hours of painstaking and fluent handwork. The intricate, lacy patterns – with names like wave, shell, flower  – passed down the generations, and were re-created in each individual shawl. Planning a new overall design involved careful arithmetic as well as artistic taste. How would a motif repeated every so many stitches fit together with the pattern chosen to run alongside it?  Everything was held in the memory, and nothing was written down.

A complete lace edging was knitted first, then wider borders tackled in quarters, followed by the central panel. After the work came off the needles (pins), a little stitching was needed. Next the creamy wool was bleached over smouldering sulphur before being washed. “Dressing” meant spreading the wet shawl on a stretcher frame made specially for its size and shape – also known as “blocking”. More ordinary shawls could be pegged into shape on the grass.

The finest shawls have always been made for export, including many exquisite pieces made from 2-ply wool that aren’t quite ethereal enough to pass the wedding ring test. Knitters accepted low rewards, exchanging their work for household goods from merchants who traded further afield. Their products were sold in fashionable London shops and worn by well-to-do women, or used as heirloom christening shawls.

In the days when Shetland women still wore shawls regularly, they made warm “haps” (coverings) for themselves: squares folded into a triangle, wrapped round the shoulders, and crossed in front, with ends tucked into skirts or aprons. Hap shawls used the coarser parts of the fleece, spun into a thicker ply of yarn. After a fancy edging, the rest of the shawl was plain knitting with a coloured border, often in shades of the natural reddish-brown “moorit” colour of some Shetland sheep. Plain centres were also found in the least well-known style: the white “crepe” shawls. Although these look less complex than an overall lace pattern, it was a challenge to keep large, undecorated areas of fine-spun wool perfectly smooth and even.

Lace knitting appeared in Shetland in the 1830s, probably after highly-skilled local women, who already made stockings for sale, saw designs from mainland Europe. The most complicated and delicate openwork patterns started to develop in the 1840s.

Hand-knitting shawls in traditional designs continues in Shetland, and the style has spread to many other places. Shawls now use machine-spun yarn, not necessarily wool, chemically-bleached or dyed to any colour. Many are made on flexible circular needles, using bought instructions spelled out stitch by stitch.