<<But I thought the famed Irish fisherman's sweaters were made from natural colored wool, with lanolin left in to make them somewhat water repellent and the knit patterns were unique to the family. So if a body washed up they knew who it was from the sweater on it. gruesome but practical, I thought. Is there any truth in this or is it a touristy fable?>>
Pretty much a touristy fable, made up by a strange man named Heinz Kiewe who ran a needlework shop in Oxford. The lanolin is *not* left in, as it attracts dirt, makes the wool much heavier (and slower to dry) and sticky and/or stiff - just generally unpleasant. Scoured wool is naturally water-resistent or repellant. And, as I think has been mentioned, it can absord an incredible amount of moisture (I think it's 30 percent of its weight) before even feeling wet. As for the fishermen's sweaters stories, the Aran-style sweaters, with their cables and textures, are a 20 c phenomenon, probably first created, oddly enough, by a couple of Irish knitters in the US. They took them back to Ireland, where they were copied locally, and later caught the attention of Kiewe, who in turn created all of the folklore and "history", as well as encouraging new patterns and sweaters. The idea of identifying a body by a sweater may have come from Kiewe, but was likely inspired by a scene in Synge's Riders to the Sea. One of the characters identifies a body by the stockings - she notices a mistake she made in knitting them. That's a far cry from knitters making their own unique patterns specifically for identification purposes. In the Netherlands, there is much more evidence for local identification (to towns and regions, not families) in patterns used in knitting sweaters. There's an excellent books that covers a lot of it: van der Klift-Tellegen, Henriette. Knitting from the Netherlands. Asheville: Lark Books, 1985. Deborah To stop mail temporarily mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: set nomail To restore send: set mail
