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Happy Saturday, since it's a winter time for most of our listeners and so many folks are spending most of their time at home, it seemed like a good time for kind of a cozy, homey episode. This is our history of mitting. If anybody took up knitting as a way to pass the time during the pandemic, send us some pictures of your creations. Even if this wasn't a new hobby for you, I would love to see pictures of people's handiwork.

I always love it. This episode originally came out on March 16, 2016.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm calling from Country Wilson, and we're finally going to hit on a topic that has been requested by a lot of people, a lot a lot of people, including Alexis and Sigfried and many others, too many to list and count. Tracy, do you knit?

Well, I mean, the short answer is yes, but I don't knit anything fancy. I basically knit things that can be constructed from rectangles. I don't fair that counts. Well, yeah, like, I know I know folks who are really, really into knitting and they know all kinds of fancy stitches and they know how to knit cables and they know how to do all of their stuff. I know how to knit and purl and add one and make one and cast on and bindoff and I can make lots of scarves and shawls and the occasional hat, but like I don't make anything fancy.

We're on similar levels at that point. Like I know how to knit the basics. It's not for me. Like in the creative realm, the yarn arts are not my thing. I'm really more of a dressmaker at heart. Part of it is that probably because I have not practiced knitting, I always feel like in the time it takes me to make a scarf, I can make six or seven dresses. So this year. So it's hard for me to get really married to the idea of knitting.

But lots of people knit and some people do absolutely beautiful things knitting and because of its functionality and providing needed clothing and covering and accessories for humans, knitting has been around for quite a long time. Exactly how long is not entirely clear. But we do know a decent amount about how it is kind of traveled with us humans through time once it came about and our colleagues at stuff Mom Never Told you did a knitting episode in January of this year. And as you might expect, their focus is some history and then a lot on how knitting has been commonly associated with one sex or the other throughout history.

And they also talk a lot in that episode about how the invention of mechanized knitting machines really shifted things and how gender roles were affected by that invention. So for us, we're going to focus more on the earlier years of knitting and similar techniques to knitting and sort of their place in history. And then we're going to talk a little bit about the vast variety of network that developed in just one small part of the world. Just kind of give you a sense of of how things can kind of blossom in different locations.

So if you want to know more about mechanized knitting and even some fun spirally did knitting tails, you should check out Cristen and Caroline's knitting episode. But we're going to focus, like I said, more on the history of particularly the early part of knitting. The first known use of the word Mnet as a noun, as in this fabric is Annet was in the late 15 hundreds, but the words roots as a verb go back a lot farther. The first known use as a verb was prior to the 12th century, and it's possibly derived from the middle English kmitten, which descends from the old English word cnitten, which is spelled with a C.

The root of that word is the old English word for knot which is knotta and it also may be linked to the Dutch word knoten. Now that I have access to the Oxford English Dictionary, I love to look things up in the Oxford English Dictionary and the first thing I did was plug it in there. And I found the most delightful thing, which is actually from an English like a French book for English speakers. And in its descriptions of how to say things about knitting was the sentence I knit bonnets or Hosein from 15 30 and Knit is spelled Kaixian Whity and I just like it was in Hosn in general.

One of the problems with tracing the history of knitting is that there were similar techniques in use throughout history that have caused some artefacts to be misidentified. So to someone who knits or knows about knitting, the difference would be fairly apparent. But to researchers that maybe aren't textile specialists, it's really easy to attribute a creation technique of an object to knitting when it might not be. And there are even cases where experts have been fooled.

Additionally, a lot of the ancient knitting examples are, of course, made out of natural fibers and a lot of them have decomposed over time. So we have very, very few actual samples to study. Most of the work looking at knitting's origins has been pieced together from cultural cues rather than actual samples of knit items.

And to complicate matters even further, in the early history of knitting, there was not standardised vocabulary for it. So even in texts where it seems like knitting is being referenced, it may not be what we think of as knitting today and vice versa. There are instances where some form of needlework or fiber arts is mentioned and it could be knitting. But we really don't have a way to know for certain because knitting and its spread are closely linked to trade routes.

We also don't know with certainty that the few historic samples that we have of knitting, that if you know that we've discovered are even from the place that they were found, they could have been made somewhere else than carried along a trade route in terms of the earliest knitting artefacts so far, they also all exist on their own. There aren't additional contemporary samples to look at to contextualize them. So, for example, we've never found a cache of knitted items all together in one space, which I don't in my imagination.

That means that there was like, no, no, 12th century cat lady did it. A million, a million pairs of mittens and little cat booties, it appears. No, it's always like one sock, one fragment, one. You know, there's not there's not a lot. So keep all of that in mind as we're talking about knitting's history and origins.

A lot of this is based on some some kind of moving parts as we try to figure out more and more about it.

And before we dig into finding Knitting's Genesis, let's first talk a little bit more in detail about the various techniques for turning yarn or thread into textiles, how the ones that aren't knitting differ from knitting and kind of where they all fit into the bigger picture.

Of course, we'll start with knitting, knitting, manipulates yarn or thread to create a textile by using two needles that's important to create loops within loops and that results in a textile that has some elasticity. So for our listeners who might not be familiar with knitting needles, they're long, smooth, relatively thin metal or wood or plastic sticks. Their sticks are pointed at one end and a lot of times they have a blunt stopper on the other end. There are variations on this basic idea for specialty knitting, but that's the basic style to knit in the round.

Needles that have to point at ends are used and the work can be passed around them in circles to create tubular. And it's like stockings. Some hat patterns use knitting in the round that'll become pretty important to the expansion of knitting as a trade.

Yeah, stockings in particular are a big driver and as a person knits, they're looping one continuous piece of fibre over and over. So you'll see I mean, you've seen pictures likely with someone knitting and they have a large scale or a large ball of yarn that they're pulling from. So it's it's not like little piece after little piece. It's usually one big thing. And then if they get to the end, they not it so that it continues to the next ball of yarn or scheme.

And the stretching is of a knitted item varies based on the size of the needles used, the thickness and the weight of the fibre being knitted and the tension of the knitter. That's how tightly or loosely he or she tends to pull the fibre. And one thing that I left out of the notes that I should mention when Tracey was talking about the different items that knitting needles can be made out of, they have been made out of many other things in history, like bone.

Sure, just basic sticks. But like if you were to go by knitting needles today, you're looking at metal, wood or plastic.

Yeah, I can't think of any alternative to bamboo, which is technically wood. Yeah, bamboo is good grass really.

But people would file it under would. Yeah. And you can get like double jointed needles that are that you would use to make the. Tubular things and like ones in the round that are connected with a piece of flexible to stuff like, there's a lot of different things you can find. Yeah, yeah. Those are the big ones. I I personally tend to be a very tight knitter when I things they come out smaller than you would expect. I used to be and I've loosened up over the years, so no bending looks very, very similar to knitting.

And it has in fact been falsely identified as knitting before. But unlike knitting, which as we said, uses two needles, nobody uses just one needle with an eye that the fiber is threaded through. Also, unlike knitting, the end of the fibre is drawn all the way through each loop. So it's worked and cut pieces rather than as one long continuous piece. So it doesn't create this loop within a loop, within a loop chain. That knitting does a fragment of fiber textile from the ruins of ancient town Dura Europos, which is in present day eastern Syria, was long identified as possibly the earliest example of knitting, and it was from around 250 to 420 somewhere in that window.

But no, that was Nalbandian, which dates back to fourteen hundred BCE based on artifacts found at Danish sites. Sometimes if you look at YouTube videos about Nalbandian, they call it like Viking knitting.

Yes. And it's very fascinating to watch. It's.

You know, there are still people doing it today, that's kind of one of the things that I love about all of these are things that go on and on and on. They haven't died out. Predating even now is a textile creation technique called spring. Spring has been dated back as far as 1500 to 1100 BCE. And while it also can look very similar to knitting, it actually requires a loom. It's not something that can be done portable on a couple of needles.

The thread used for spraying is stretched to a high tension and secured at both ends during weaving. So you kind of create a grid of that. And then when the tension is released, after all the wet, the the weaving is done, it kind of pops into a smaller shape.

And then you have a stretchy net like textile as a result, just for the sake of yarn arts exclusivity, we're also going to mention crochet. So we know that crochet came along a lot later in the 18th century, but it was an evolution of an embroidery technique that was called timbering. So crochet, which has worked with a single hook instead of needles arose from the stitch, is being worked separately away from the back in cloth, and it doesn't usually get confused with knitting.

We're looking at historical pieces.

Yeah, I don't think I've ever stumbled across any that are like this is knitting. I mean, certainly Laman will do that in day to day modern life or they'll go, oh yeah. So it's so knit me the scarf. It's like, no, that's crochet. But in terms of historical artifacts, we don't usually run into that problem.

And knitting start, though, like so many other things, likely came from the cradle of civilization there, with some estimates placing its development around the eighth or ninth century. And it's possible that knitting is a direct descendant of not work fishing nets used by sailors from Arabic countries during that time. But the first known examples of knitting are from Egypt, and they're from around 1000 to 4500. These are blue and white cotton socks with an intricate pattern that indicates that they're almost definitely not the first knitted thing.

They're kind of too advanced. They're simply the oldest knitted thing that we have left.

You've ever knit something for the first time? It would not look like this.

From Egypt and Islamic countries around the Mediterranean, knitting spread to Europe, and then it's spread out throughout that continent and then from trade, it kind of went globally from there.

And knitting's rapid spread when you think about it makes a lot of sense compared to other textile creation options. It was fast and relatively cheap. And I'm sure any modern knitters listening may have laughed at that one because good yarn could get really expensive in a hurry. Knitting a sweater is very rarely going to save you any money and in many cases will cost you a great deal more than purchasing one at a store. But you will have a custom work of art at the end.

There was also no need for loom with knitting and it was relatively easy to learn. It was also portable. You just needed to thin, stiff items to act as a needle and to act as needles and then a thread or the thread or the yarn that you were going to use in the variety of items that could be created with knitting was incredibly diverse. So by varying the weight and thread or yarn used or the size of the needles in the stitches, everything from heavy weight knits that were like protective items to delicate laces could be created using the basic same handheld technology.

Another cool thing about knitting that I think is less true, at least in my experience of a lot of other textiles that you might make for utility purposes, is that you can learn pretty easily to knit in the dark like the. Oh, that's true. The woman who taught me to knit grew up in Germany during World War Two, and they had a lot of times when they would have to be in blackout conditions. And so they they all knew how to knit by feel, which it's a lot easier, I think, to knit by feel, especially if you're knitting something pretty simple then to sew a garment by feel or to embroider by feel.

That's just my guess.

I kind of want to do an art project where I make things in the dark and see what they look like.

So the first known examples of knitting in Europe are pillow covers made of silk fiber and they were found in Spain and they're dated circa 12 75. In addition to the pillow covers which were found in a prince's tomb. Most of the knitting examples from Spain were around the same time, are pretty ornate and a lot of them were liturgical items that were for use in the Catholic Church.

And coming up, we're going to talk about an alternate, though unsubstantiated origin point for knitting. But first, we're going to pause for a word from one of our.

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So. So we mentioned before the break that there is an alternate story of where it came from, there are actually several, but these are the kind of big ones.

This is an apocryphal story about the origin of knitting that kind of slots it before any of these known examples that we've talked about in this tale claims that St. Fiachra, who is an Irish ebbitt, invented knitting and then passed it on to France and that it spread from there. So this kind of is the exact opposite direction of spread that we actually have archaeological evidence of.

And this would shift dates really significantly, though, as, say, Fiachra died in the year 670, there's no real evidence to back the claim that he invented knitting, although he is claimed by some as the patron saint of knitting. And there does not appear to be an official patron saint of knitters that I could find. But there are several that are claimed by various different ideologies and groups. So in addition to Saint Fiachra, St. Lucie, Saint Ursula, Saint Sebastian and Saint Rebekah have all been claimed by knitters at some point in time.

But none of these stories really holds the key to the history of knitting in the technique outside of Spain, the majority of knitted items in Europe between the late 13th century, right up to the early 15th century or not. Perhaps what you might think of when you imagine knitting today, they weren't sweaters, sweaters or scarves or other weighty garments, but they were the sort of fine work that had been found in that prince's tomb from earlier. They were accessory items.

They were delicate and fine and items that had to do more with adornment and decoration than utility. By late 14th century, knitting had definitely made its way to Germany and Italy. And we know that because the Virgin Mary is actually depicted in art from this time period.

Knitting. Yeah, and you know, that wonderful feeling when you change clothes from a fitted garment made from a woven fabric, i.e. one that has no stretch to a comfy net, that's got some give. Well, so did Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries, because this is when knitted stockings became very, very popular as trade exploded and more and more people had access to knit wares and learned to knit, according to an article in an 1832 printing of the latest Penny Gazette.

There's a story that says that once Queen Elizabeth was given a pair of black knitted stockings from her silk woman allegedly in the third year of her reign, she then refused to go back to woven cloth stockings, one of the Oxford English Dictionary examples of the word.

It was about Queen Elizabeth's clothes.

Yes, she became a big fan once. She was like, wait, Fabricant stretch. Excuse me.

She was all in their popularity, became so great that knitting basically became huge business at this time when knitting guilds in Europe really surged in popularity. And while there is mention of what may have been some sort of knitting guild in France as early as twelve sixty eight, this really had to do with milliner's of gloves and hats. We don't really have additional confirmation of this until thirteen, sixty six. That's when actual documents are there. It's entirely possible that they were more like standard Ottilia for accessories and then adopted knitting as the arts popularity rose and demand for knitted items skyrocketed.

And by the 4802, we know that there were knitting guilds in the Netherlands and Italy, and by the early 1400's the knitting guild was one of the most important guilds in Paris and there were guilds spread throughout Europe. By the mid 16th century, knitting was a prominent trade throughout the continent. Knitting in Russia became so commonplace by the 40s, knitted stockings were considered a standard part, a military gear.

The point of a guild was to maintain and improve quality in the craft, teach new tradesmen and to help market the goods of its members to join. The guild is a master knitter, a tradesman, and this was an all male profession at the time would have to devote six years of his life to study three as an apprentice and three traveling to learn new techniques. After the six year training period, a guild candidate would have approximately three months to produce a prescribed assortment of knitted items, ranging from delicate gloves to a full knitted carpet.

And then these would be reviewed for quality. If the work was worthy, the applicant would then be granted guild membership. And up to this point, for the most part, it appears that there was really just one primary knitting stitch in use. So the basic one that you would start with, if you learn today, like Tracy and I talked about, we can and we can Purlie, that means that if you're doing that with the right side, showing it's smooth stitches that are created by the loops and the back side, which is considered the plural side, shows those stitches as bumps.

There's a little more texture. And up to this point, any variation in the design of a knitted item was created by changing the yarn color. But in the mid 16th century, somewhere right in there, we see textured knitting beginning where some of the stitches are knitted, in effect backward, so that the bumps, those Purlie stitches appear on the otherwise smooth right side to create patterns and designs.

So it also mean that you could change the stitch at the end so your stuff wouldn't curl up at the bottom. Yeah. What irritates me about that stitch today is I think we call stocking it. Maybe that's why, of course, once this started, it never stopped. People are still manipulating stitches to create new texture designs all the time. The latter half of the 1500 is also the time period where people figured out how to skip stitches, to leave empty spaces.

And Nettwerk, as part of the design, creating a little Eilerts and then progressively to more intricate laces. And this is where my knitting knowledge stops because I had this beautiful pattern that involved doing exactly this thing to make us lazy, looking small. And because, as I said earlier, I am a very tight knitter. I realized about three quarters of the way through that I was making a doll shawl and not a human shawl because I had been knitting the whole thing way too tightly.

Yeah, it's interesting to me.

I had not thought of ILIT fabrics sort of being I hadn't thought of it in that way, but that's they were creating eyelets just kind of fascinates me.

So when the stocking frame knitting machine was invented in fifteen, eighty nine. So this is not long after people really started to play with design style and knitting. It was the first step in a dramatic shift for knitting. Knitting by hand did not vanish at this point. That came a bit later and it never vanished. But this didn't cause its immediate drop off. And we'll talk about why in a moment.

But the inventor of the stonking frame was an English gentleman by the name of William Lee. And there is a rather fanciful story that claims that Lee invented his knitting frame because the woman he was enamored with was always very preoccupied with her knitting and thus had no time or attention for him.

So he decided he would free up her time by inventing a contraption that would take all the work out of her hands. And he spent the next three years working on it. Doesn't seem like he ever did win the love of his muse, though, but it did change his career path from ministry to industry as he turned his stocking production into his full time job. Once again, we will go back to Queen Elizabeth, the first because it was known that she was fond of stockings.

There's a reason that that a reference to her came up when Tracey looked up knit in the Oxford English Dictionary. Lee went to her and presented his invention and petitioned for a patent, but the monarch refused to issue him one. She was very fearful that this invention was going to put too many people out of work.

We talk about that in our episode about the Luddites, which also relates to knitting.

Now that I think about it, knitting is everywhere. It is everywhere. So France King Henry.

The Fourth, however, was completely happy to form a partnership with Lee and his brother. And so the siblings moved to Paris to produce frames and train knitters there to use them. Seemed like a really good setup. But five years later, in sixteen ten, King Henry the fourth was assassinated and Lee's agreement with the monarchy was no longer valid. When the inventor tried to pursue the matter with France's legal system, he met with obstacle after obstacle and then he died in 1914.

And that sounds very sad, but there's actually something of a happy ending to this tale. William Lee's brother then went back to England, and when he did, he smuggled some of their remaining knitting frames with him. And allegedly some of the the people that have been trained to use them went as well. He set up a production partnership which would eventually become the Worshipful Company of Framework Knitters, which started as a guild with a royal charter in 1863.

It existed before that, but that's when it became a royal charter.

And this actually still exists today as a livery company with numerous charitable projects as well as education and outreach.

Once the Industrial Revolution arrived, knitting became even more mechanized and hand knitting was no longer needed to keep up with supply demands. There continued to be people who did hand knit items for sale, but it became a much smaller cottage industry and handwriting was also freed up to be a hobby. Instead of the way you made your living. You want to learn more about the whole economic ramifications of all that that I previously mentioned depth's. What about the Luddites? Yeah, like I said, Christine and Caroline really talk a lot about kind of what happens after industrialization and and how it changed things.

So next, we are going to talk about some of the specific design styles of knitting in various locations. But before we do, let's take a quick break.

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Believe it or not, this is stuff you should know. You know the podcast with over a billion listeners. It's now for your eyes so you can read it. Stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things covers everything from the origin of the Murphy bed to why people get lost, become the most interesting person you know. Now at stuff you should know dotcom or wherever books are sold. As knitting spread throughout the world, different areas became known for specific styles or designs of knitting, Austria and Germany became known for heavily cabled designs in the traditional knitting style found in Turkey, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan features chain stitch embroidery and really find patterns.

And those have been passed down through centuries in South America, developed uniquely shaped accessories, those fantastic pointed caps that we still see made today, and chunky textiles that are made with thick wool fibers.

We're going to focus a little on the notable styles that have developed through the British Isles and Ireland, because for such a relatively small area, there's just a lot of variety and a lot of specificity to each region's individual knitting styles.

So fair ailments, that's probably a phrase that you have heard before, whether you knit or not. If you have just shopped, you have probably seen something advertised this way. That name has been leveraged by clothing companies for years in advertising to convey quality. And Fair Isle is a relatively remote island to the north of Scotland, and it's become known for knitting style that really echoes Scandinavian designs. The modern version of a fairytale sweater, which really hit its developmental stride in the 19 teens, features horizontal stripes of repeating designs worked in multiple colours.

Barile is near to the islands that make up Shetland, a region known for its wool. That wool, which is multicolored both because of the wide range of sheep colours and because some are dyed with natural colour and such as lichen. And matter has been a key component in Fair Isle knitting since the eighteen hundreds in the modern era. Some synthetic dyes have been used in Farrall knitting, but it's really at a minimum, with natural dyes still holding a lot of favor.

During the 1920s in particular, Faryal knits were incredibly popular with the fashion set, particularly in more muted colorways. If you look at fashion plates, particularly for gentlemen of the 1920s, you will see exactly what we're talking about with the Fair Isle sweater, particularly like with a golfing outfit that like really unique, beautiful banded design, repeats the Channel Islands off the French West Coast, have a knitting tradition that dates back to the late Tudor era.

And this region made very fine stockings favoured by the likes of Mary Queen of Scots.

And the location close to the European continent made it a natural place for exporting knitting to other countries because the islands became somewhat isolated as revolutions and wars kept neighboring countries busy, the export business lagged, but the knitting continued and the drop off in influence from trading countries actually cemented the style of sweater that's considered the Channel Islands signature. It's a very squared off, boxy shape with knotted edges. It's sort of a decorative nodding along the edges. That's they're kind of finishing.

And there's also normally a slit on either side of a sweater and as I say, sweater over and over. I feel compelled to mention that in some countries they call it a jumper. Yep. I'm referring specifically to like a pullover sweater, even though sweater also gets used to reference things like cardigans and whatnot, at least in the U.S. but a pullover setter sweater or what some people would call a jumper. So that slit that I was mentioning is normally on either side of the bottom edge, like at the hip of these sweaters for range of movement.

And these were particularly in dark colors, very popular with fishermen for decades north of the Scottish mainland, as we alluded to earlier, are the Shetland Islands and. One of the hallmarks of the Shetland knitting tradition is its variety goods ranging from rugged blankets and socks all the way to the most delicate lace have all been refined to perfection. Their. And as early as the beginning of the seventeen hundreds, there was trade between the Shetland Islands and merchants from Germany and the Netherlands, but it wasn't really until the 40s that Lay started to be an export focus.

Up to that point, all of that trade was more in like the heavier goods. And one of the really lovely characteristics of the final pieces of Shetland is that they're knitted on the base. So they start with a single stitch which forms the corner rather than casting on a row of stitches and knitting a square. Like Tracey said at the top of the show, she can knit things that are made from rectangles. Usually that involves casting on, you know, X number of stitches and then you knit all your rows.

But this casts on one stitch and then expands slowly in this beautiful byas knit. A lay scarf or a shawl from Shetland during its lace heyday was considered so fine and light that you could pass an entire full sized piece through a wedding ring easily. This was part of like how they would show the quality to merchants. And as the chunkier Fair Isle Network became vogue in the 1920s, as we mentioned, it became kind of part of the fashionable set.

Shetland kind of followed that trend and moved a little bit away from lace and into heavier wool garments.

I think that thing that I abandoned that was turning into a doll shawl started with one stitch and the it's hard.

I don't. My grandmother used to knit on the bias and I would just sit there agog, like I couldn't really grasp how she kept the tension. Right. And again, it's years and years of experience, but who could not do it?

And the pattern will tell you to begin by knitting a gauge swatch to make sure that what it turns out, the correct size. And I lazily have never done that, which hasn't really mattered when I've been making scarves. Right.

But it mattered a lot when trying to make that saw. The story of knitting in the air and islands in Galway Bay off Ireland's West Coast is tied to a previous podcast topic, the Irish Potato Famine. In 1891, the congested districts board was formed to address the issue of poverty in the plan was to train people to knit exportable goods. This became a local industry and it grew to the point that the government agency's training program led to more and more intricate designs.

The hallmark of the styles that were developed during this time was the use of thick wool yarn that was left in its natural colour and the last of the regions of Great Britain and Ireland.

That we're going to talk about today is the Yorkshire Dales. And this rural region is unique in that industrialisation really did not impact it to the degree that it did other areas in terms of knitting. It remained a farming area, as it always had with knitting is sort of a secondary industry. And one of the most interesting characteristics that I just fell in love when I read this of the knitting style associated with Yorkshire Dales isn't a pattern or a type of wool, but the actual physical way that knitting continued there for many decades.

Knitting was not as it is for many people, a sit down activity, but it was something literally done on the go while walking about with the yarn secured in a pouch or basket at the waist. I love this so much. Knitting also developed as a social activity in the communities of the region, with large group gatherings and parties for all ages that focused on the same things that would happen at any gathering place knitting. So kind of like a quilting bee or a candle making, but knitting.

Yeah, but you would be doing those the knitting while you stood there and chatted or perhaps even danced a little bit. I'm just I'm really wowed and delighted by the idea of knitting while you do other things while you perambulate about.

We also have a little bit of late breaking news because we mentioned briefly South America, which presumably either got knitting through trade or they were developing their own yarn arts. But there was a really interesting discovery very, very recently in January of 2016.

So just a few months ago and at a 4000 year old dig site in Lima, Peru, there, researchers there turned up what were described as knitting implements in a woman's tomb. And whether or not these were actually knitting implements or tools for some other fibre art isn't clear to us just yet. I have only seen them listed as knitting implements, but if they are knitting implements, this really changes the narrative of knitting history significantly. If they can find evidence that this was actual knitting, that completely changes the timeline.

So these items were found with numerous other artifacts that will no doubt all be studied. So hopefully we will eventually get some news about what all of that is. But right now we don't know. So that could make all of this podcast completely incorrect in terms of its historical accuracy. Its timeline will still exist, but there will be things that predate all of it, which would be cool. And we can do an update at that point. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.

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