Traveling Stitches: Origins of Fair Isle Knitting

The tradition of Fair Isle knitting seems to have been emerged too well developed to have actually started in the islands north of Scotland. This paper suggests a source in the Baltic region of Eastern Europe. Like much of the “history ” of knitting, much published information on the history of Fair Isle-type knitting is folklore. The long-standing story is that a ship, El Gran Grifon, from the Spanish Armada, was wrecked on Fair Isle in 1588. The 17 households on the island took the sailors in. That much is true, and documented. The knitting story is that, in return, the Spaniards taught the islanders the brightly colored patterned knitting now known as Fair Isle. Not surprisingly, there appears to have been no multi-colored knitting tradition in Spain in the sixteenth century. What is called Fair Isle knitting today, which combines a variety of colors with small geometric pattern motifs, dates no earlier than the mid-nineteenth century, even on Fair Isle itself. It certainly is not the “ancient ” art it is often claimed to be, and it is not hundreds of years old. The Fair Isle “yoke ” sweaters of the 1960s, popular in the United States, were a result of machine knitting and industrialization, and may have bee