Knitting -- another Celtic knitting tradition

I learned about Bavarian twisted stitch traditional knitting some time ago. Having been born in Nuremberg, in Bavaria, while my dad was serving his U.S. Army hitch to pay off his dental school, I had to see what it was about and did a lot of googling at first. I think I'm hooked.

The acknowledged expert was Maria Erlbacher; she started with works by Thekla Zeiler, who in turn worked from still older examples.  Erlbacher's three volume publication is available as one volume:

https://www.schoolhousepress.com/twisted-stitch-knitting.html

Erlbacher gives instructions for working both with and without a cable needle. Some motifs need you to use extra needles to hold stitches and she tells you so.

Possibly the best thing about this book is that it never teaches you to read transcripts. All the patterns have diagrams, which I recommended when I posted about lace as much because it's harder to lose your place as because it gives you a sneak peek at what your work should look like. All the methods of making stitches travel show what the diagram shows and then there are instructions in words that cover traveling in either direction. 

In the pattern I chose for training, there was one sticky bit in row 3 that I had to unravel and re-do about three times, and then I got it. And even then I decided I was doing it wrong and changed it a bit the last time I did it.

There was also a bit in row 5 with no word instructions, but there was one that was close enough to figure out, as long as I ignored the purl stitches that it showed.

So definitely, before you start a full-up project, train yourself with some leftover yarn to work the motifs in your pattern. The book has some pages of samplers by the woman who taught Maria: you can always do that.

I used a skein of leftover Aran weight (heavy worsted) on size 8 needles, cast on 171 stitches and worked 2 rows of seed stitch at each end, plus my typical selvage at the sides. I used up about 3/4 of it and got 20 rows of pattern (plus 4 rows of seed stitch and the selvages on each end) out of 150 yards of yarn; it's about 40 x 3.25 inches. This is only the back of a specific project; in the yarn weight Erlbacher recommends it will be smaller.

Here is a video from Suzanne Bryan which demonstrates how to work on both the right side and the wrong side if you are working in the flat. Working in the round is much easier, which is no surprise for a Celtic-look pattern.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl5-D8Cddpk

Norman at Nimble Needles says that he lives in Bavaria and nobody there knits this way. I'm not giving you his link because he doesn't demonstrate working on the wrong side. At one point he observes that you literally DON'T want to use a cable needle with this style because, while there are tense moments while you take stitches off the needle hoping to put them back on, it would drive you crazy to be putting a cable needle in and out of stitches as often as you would have to with this tradition.

Erlbacher's patterns are drawn from examples in Austrian museums, which explains why this pattern looks Celtic. The Celts lived in the Austrian mountains in the 800s BCE; they spread or migrated into Bohemia (now Czech Republic) and Bavaria – the names are related – and then moved northwest. In Caesar’s time they were known as Gauls -- Gauls and Gaels were the same people until the latter moved across the Channel. The resemblance between “Brittany”, "Breton", and “Britain” is no coincidence. Northwestern Europe has from 30% to over 75% Celtic DNA in its male chromosomes. In England alone the percentage is better than 50%, which wouldn't be possible if, as the Victorian myth has it, the Anglo-Saxons wiped out the Brythones (Welsh). 

Most of the designs for tops are for cardigans but can be adapted as jumpers, which would let you work in the round.

The book says to knit socks using U.S. size zero or 1 needles (1.5 mm to 2.5 mm, which are UK/Canadian sizes 14 or 13). That goes with using lace weight or light fingering weight yarn, which seems terribly thin but for two things. One is, if you use a smaller than usual needle, you get a tighter fabric which is warmer. Second, as I learned with Aran sweaters, the twists and cables are warmer than flat fabric. You want 250-300 grams of wool, which is 5-6 50 gram skeins.

For a lady's cardigan with patch pockets, the book recommends 3 mm needles which are size 2.5 U.S. so use either 2 or 3 (12 or 10 U.K./Canadian). It takes some 1000 yards of wool. Cardigans are knitted in sections, washed, blocked, and sewn together, but there are discussions of working in the round. The book warns against ruining the pattern through a common habit of novices, purling plain instead of twisted. There, you've been warned.

Oh yeah. German sizing in the book is not identical to either UK or US, so here is a site with translations from German sizing to cm/inches.
http://www.bavarianspecialty.com/pages/Sizing.html

NUMBER ONE PRO TIP for this tradition. Be a tight-ass about your first row. The success or failure of your whole piece depends on getting the right number of KTBLs or Ps in the right order in that first row. Go slowly, count over and over again, until you are 110% certain that you have it right.

PRO TIP NUMBER TWO. I found out that twisted stitch works like Aran in more ways than one. The patterns in the book show what order to put motifs in. They do not show how to continue working when you get to the top of the sample. What you do is figure out the smallest increment of the pattern and go from there. So, look at the right side of my photo where it has that swath between the columns of sort of bubbles. Here's the pattern.

Can you find out how to work above this just by starting again at the bottom? I couldn't.

What you do instead is forget those top two rows and start again from the bottom for the swath. 

For the columns with circles at both sides, you work five plain rows and then do that thing between the horizontal lines, which is what produces the "bubbles". 

So every motif in a pattern is a law unto itself, the columns are not coordinated across the rows. The same is true for my Aran pattern.

PRO TIP THREE. THIS IS NOT A RACE. You will never build up the speed you can get when working a mono-color jumper using pencil hold and steeking and all those other tricks. GO AS SLOWLY AS YOU HAVE TO SO THAT EVERY SINGLE STITCH IS RIGHT.

PRO TIP FOUR. Most of the patterns for tops come in sections. Start from the bottom working right to left on the first section, then the second. Now go UP to the next row and work LEFT TO RIGHT ON THE SECOND SECTION, then left to right on the first. Every pattern is a boustrophedon. (Look THAT up in your Funk and Wagnalls.)

PRO TIP FIVE. DON'T BE ASHAMED TO UNRAVEL. I thought I was four rows from the end but suddenly the pattern wouldn't come out, and I found I had dropped a stitch. I had to unravel four rows to fix it.

PRO TIP SIX, especially for jumpers. Stop between every row and let both your eyes and your hands take a break, otherwise you'll get a headache and your fingers will cramp. Also make sure to get your meals and snacks, your potty breaks, and once in a while do a little house work or yard work, play with the kids or walk around the block. This is a piece of knitting, not open heart surgery, and you can get back to it whenever possible in between living your life.

Recommendation: save paper. Whether you're working on a sampler or pick a pattern to train on, put it on your phone or tablet or laptop. Use that to work from. That leaves the book free so you can leaf back and forth to the diagrams for each stitch. 

There's a story that one expert knitter in the Fair Isles got a special order and finished it in 48 hours. She probably had a knitter's belt and she may have kept knitting during potty breaks. You will never do that in this tradition. I doubt you could even finish a sock in 48 hours. Is it worth the trouble just to check off another item on my bucket list? No, but I'm in this to participate in the beauty of knitting traditions. You might prefer to learn enough to design your own knitted artwork, in either two or three dimensions. De gustibus non est disputandum.