Hands-Free Knitting with Belts and Sheaths

A few years ago, I asked my sister-in-law Joyce if she’d show me cable knitting. She brought over a project in progress to demonstrate and proceeded to put her right-hand needle in her armpit like a medieval jouster.

Thus began my expanded view of how needles could be held. I knew about English-versus-continental styles, but this was something different. This went to the very essence of how your needles connected to your body.

I thought perhaps pit-knitting was just a Cumbrian thing until two of my friends from opposite ends of Britain said their mothers and grandmothers also kept their “pins” in their pits.

My mind was still working on this, when I visited the Dales Countryside Museum in Hawes and I saw my first wooden knitting sticks or sheaths.

A selection of sheaths from the Dumfries and Galloway Museum, Scotland, including goose wing, twisted, and notched.

The sheaths were works of wood whittling given by suitors to sweethearts, husbands to wives, fathers and brothers to daughters and sisters. Some had little inset glass windows with inscriptions behind them. Others had puzzle chains attached to them to show the carver’s skill. Some were shaped like shoes or legs.

Examples of heart and fish-shaped sheaths as well as a goose-wing style. Dales Countryside Museum, Hawes.

Across Europe, sheaths were made of everything from wood to bone, silver to even glass. Regions favored a material like copper or clay based on availability. Some styles of carving proliferated in regions like a goose-wing shape in the north of England or a fish shape in Cornwall. Some Dutch examples have porcupine quills woven in a casing around them. Ultimately, wood was the most accessible and workable material.

To use a sheath, the knitter wore a belt or used an apron string around their waist. The sheath was inserted between the belt and body. The stick often had a notch, carved feature, or texture that helped anchor it and kept it from slipping through the belt. There was a hole in the end of the stick and that’s where the needle went. The needles would be double pointed and sometimes curved.

Martha Dinsdale of Appersett, Wensleydale, using a sheath. Dales Countryside Museum, Hawes.

The fact that the needles were double pointed didn’t always mean that the knitting would be in the round, it was simply the case that needles with knobs on the end were not common until the 19th century. Since a huge amount of the hand-knitting trade was in stockings and hose, knitting in the round was an essential skill. Needles were made of wire by a blacksmith or sold by a traveling peddler because there weren’t shops where you could buy needles.

An unidentified Daleswoman using a sheath. Dales Countryside Museum, Hawes.

If you look further afield to Shetland, you’ll find their similar way of keeping the right-hand needle secure—the knitting belt. There you had an oval leather pillow filled with horsehair. One side of the pillow was punctured with holes the diameter of the needles. The pillow was either attached to a belt or inserted between a belt and the body.

There are further variations of “sheaths” such as leather or cloth cones stuffed with straw, wooden spills, or porcupine quills which you could secure in a belt or under your arm.

Collection of Ann Kingstone. Study day, Hawes.

One of my favorite variations are the metal hearts that would be sewn to a small pillow and then secured by apron strings or a belt. They had a knob soldered to them into which the point of the needle would go.

It’s one thing to marvel at all of these knitting needle holders and another to consider why it would be practical to have your long needle secured in a sheath, pillow, or cone at your side. And the answer, of course, is work and getting on with it at all times.

Knitting stick, 18th century, German, boxwood with silver cap. Upper part is carved with the heads of putti, beneath which are figures representing Faith, Hope, and Charity. Grooved spirally and twined around with serpents. I saw this in person by using the V&A “Order an Object” Service.

Shetland women gathered peat in baskets on the moors and then walked home with baskets on their backs. As they walked, they clicked their pins at a rapid rate. Having their knitting suspended on a needle at their side meant their hands were freer as they walked and worked. The weight of the wool was on their needle, not in their hands.

If you are pressing cheese, stoking a hearth fire, walking to trade eggs for butter in the market town, tending children, and generally managing a home without modern conveniences, your hands need to be free. But you also need to knit for your family and for extra income. So, your knitting doesn’t stay in a basket by the fire, it sits right on your hip where you can do another few rows as you wait for the bread to bake or the fire to catch.

This is not to say that knitting sticks and their cousins were only used by working women. There are exquisite examples of knitting sticks used by privileged ladies who held their needles in the same manner as those in humble cottages.

Some knitting sticks had wooden chains with hooks at the end onto which a ball of wood could be fastened. Dales Countryside Museum, Hawes.

By now you might be wondering “Where was the ball of yarn while these knitting sticks were used?” That is a tale for another time.