A Brother Knitting Machine is shown. (Courtesy photo)

By IRIS DOHRENWEND

8-18 Media

Special to the Journal

Have you ever wondered how clothes were made in the past? Today, I will cover a brief history of the knitting industry and the amazing mechanics behind it. The first-ever knitting guild was established in France in 1268. Knitting guilds were some of the first forms of the knitting industry. If you wanted a knit garment, you would go to your local guild and put in an order. After a week or so, you would pick up the order.

According to an article by Regina Jeffers, the cost of a pair of silk stockings was about $40 (present-day currency) and was considered a mark of social status. I know what you are thinking, $40 for a pair of socks? But when you break it down, it is not an outrageous price.

First, the cost of the silk, the time it takes to hand-knit the socks, and the fact that these people were paid living wages, compared to modern garments made in developing countries, where the workers are paid cents in poor working conditions. Remember, silk stockings were for the upper class, and if you were wealthy, that’s how you would spend your money. BBC states that both women and men knitted professionally for centuries, and it wasn’t until the mid-to-late 19th Century that it became associated with domesticity.

The knitting industry stayed mostly the same until the invention of the knitting machine, or “stocking frame as they called it back then in 1589 by William Lee. he took his invention to Queen Elizabeth I to get patented, but was declined due to her worries about the security of the nation’s hand knitters. Not much happened for some time, and sadly, William passed away. His brother James later picked up his work and continued making improvements, working with a mill. By the mid-19th century, knit textile factories consisted mainly of knitting machines, and by the mid-20th century, domestic knitting machines were popping up on the market, marketed to housewives who hand-knit but did not have much spare time. Domestic machine knitting was most popular in the 1950s to the 1960s and has been declining in popularity ever since. Only one brand still makes domestic knitting machines, and that is Silver Reed. Studio, Passap, Shima Seiki, Stoll, Brother, Toyota, Corolla, Passap, Singer, Empisal, Knitmaster, and Knitking all used to make knitting machines but stopped in the 80s-90s. You can still find them second-hand, but it takes some digging to get one for a good price and in good condition.

It is not as popular as it used to be, but people still machine knit. I became interested in machine knitting when a lady from Houghton came to do a demonstration in the Marquette Commons. I found it intriguing that one row of knitting took like two seconds to do. At that point, I was learning how to hand-knit and crochet, but found it discouraging when it took so long to finish a garment, especially when I was more interested in designing and constructing the garments rather than doing the knitting part.

I still value hand knitting and hand knitters, but I found this was more what I was interested in.

A lot of vintage machines had patterning mechanisms for color work and stitch patterns that you can hack with AYAB. This adds an element of software engineering and graphic design that is really cool. People tend to think that machine knitting is cheating. Is it not any more “cheating” than using a sewing machine? Especially since knitting machines were invented almost two centuries before the sewing machine. You are also freer to experiment and make mistakes, as it takes less time to knit each stitch. If you love wearing clothes that you made, I would say machine knitting is for you!

There are also really cool machine knitting communities like AYAB (all yarns are beautiful), an open-sourced project that works on retrofitting old knitting machines by enabling them to be controlled by your laptop

If you are interested in knitting machines, your best bets are on Facebook Marketplace or eBay. Check to see if your community has a machine knitting guild. They would be able to help you find a machine. If you are a beginner, make sure to have the seller send a video of the machine working.

Silver Reed still sells a metal bed knitting machine and a cheaper basic plastic bed one called the LK-150 that is quite popular. It is about $500 brand new, but cheaper second-hand. You can even sometimes find knitting machines for free! People clear out their relatives’ houses and don’t know what to do with the supplies. In these cases, you might end up taking home a full stash of yarn! Even if you were not interested in knitting, I hope this caught your attention. Happy knitting!

Iris Dohrenwend is an 8th-grade student going into 9th grade. She has 2 cats, a rabbit, and a sister. In her free time, she enjoys reading, cooking, and baking