For almost as long as I've been a knitter, I've been fascinated by the history of knitting. I've especially enjoyed the mind-twisting process of working with the often obtuse and obfuscatory language of antique patterns. There's a thrill, I find, in watching a project emerge row by row and knowing that other knitters, long gone, followed the same path.

The process of decoding, testing and correcting isn't for everyone, though; and so in this column I hope to share the excitement of the journey by removing as many of the roadblocks as possible. You don't need to be a historian to come along -- just a knitter with a curious mind.

Flowery

A romantic temperament is the enemy of good history writing. As I am cursed with the former, I struggle with the latter.

The duty of the historian is to uncover and present facts. He or she will necessarily select them, edit them, arrange them, interpret them -- but ought not to embellish or invent them.

But here's the thing: Good history doesn't necessarily guarantee a good story. Have you seen that amazing HBO mini-series about the War of 1812? No, you haven't. The War of 1812 was a pivotal event in the history of the fledgling United States. But narratively? A snoozefest.*

When the subject is the history of knitting, the temptation to embellish is ferocious.

In part it's because there's not much to work with. When it comes to knitting, the written record is nearly mum for centuries at a time, as is the visual record. Extant examples?** Few and far between, especially prior to the nineteenth century. With little or nothing to analyze, there is little or nothing to say -- unless you choose to invent.

So knitting history attracts invention the way knitting itself attracts curious cats, spilled coffee, and Velcro. Many of the most commonly traded stories are suppositions (or pure fabrications) that have gained an air of credibility through repetition.

If you want to make a knitting historian cry,*** say any of the following:

• Knitting was invented by Irish fisherman. They figured it out while they were making nets.
• The cable patterns in fishermen's sweaters were jealously guarded family secrets. If a fisherman drowned, his sweater would be used to identify his corpse.
• Stranded color work was brought to Fair Isle by shipwrecked Spanish sailors who washed ashore after the defeat of the Armada.
• You saw an authentic mediaeval knitted lace shawl on Game of Thrones.

(No it wasn't. No they weren't. No it wasn't. No you didn't.)

Those are all very pretty stories. That's why it's fun to tell them. But when subjected to scrutiny (and they have been) there's either evidence proving they are untrue; or there's not enough evidence to support their claim to truth.

You cannot call it history if you haven't got supporting evidence. Wishing will not make it so.

Working on this issue's project, the clash between my desire to present you with good history and my desire to tell you a ripping tale was so extreme it caused a thunderstorm in my brain.

I started calmly enough. I've had my eye on The Floral Knitting Book (1847) for years, ever since the University of Southampton graciously put online the collection of the late Richard Rutt (author of A History of Hand Knitting).

It's a curiosity, certainly not of general interest. Making flowers out of things that were emphatically not flowers (wax, sugar, glass, silk, ribbons, tissue paper, human hair -- to name a few) was a Victorian mania. The book's introduction notes with apparent surprise that no other published work had yet addressed the creation of realistic flowers through knitting, then plunges into the recipe for a white lily.

I almost gave up at the testing stage. Floral Knitting is a mess, frankly. The flowers themselves are remarkable for their commitment to realistic detail and ingenious construction. But to gather the information you may require for any one project about needles, gauge, materials, and techniques you have to read the whole thing, cover to cover, line by line. Even then, much is left out. Numbers, more often than not, fail to add up.

I've written before about throwing misbegotten patterns at the wall. Floral Knitting came close to being set on fire.

The more I started to think of the author as an adversary the more I began to wonder what sort of person she had been. The book says almost nothing. I don't even know her name. On the cover and title page, she is "A Lady."

The Lady describes herself as "the Inventress" on a page offering private lessons, then -- tantalizingly -- gives her four initials and an address in the neighborhood of Somers Town, London.

A little digging turned up some intriguing information. The address no longer exists, having been razed and replaced in the twentieth century by a public housing estate. At the time the book was written, the neighborhood was...well, not "bad," perhaps, but not what the English would call "smart." Most certainly not fashionable.

So here was this Lady, living in a shifty part of London and inviting women of leisure to come to her home to learn floral knitting.

My romantic temperament threatened to run off at full gallop. It wanted me to present you with a pathetic, hand-tinted tale of a genteel Early Victorian lady desperately seeking to stave off poverty without losing her respectability. Alone and afraid, with the wolf (and the bailiffs) at the door, she scrambled together her last pennies to publish the book and establish a teaching clientele.

All of which, of course, is speculation. Fiction. It's not history. I still don't know anything about the woman in question but her initials, her publisher, and her address. I can't write about the rest in a history column.

But it turns out I can't stop thinking about her. So I'm going hunting.

I'll let you know what I find.

Stay tuned.

What the Lady intended should be done with the finished flowers is mostly left to the imagination. I'm betting more than a few arrangements wound up on parlor tables under glass domes. My apartment is bit old-maidish, but that's going too far.

She does suggest a few varieties be can used as dress or hat ornaments, and that's when it hit me: a boutonnière. Aside from weddings and funerals they've been out of fashion for a good century or so, but I never let that stop me from wearing anything. I love them, I wear them, and I wanted a knitted one.

Then I remembered that the common American name for Heart's-Ease (Viola tricolor) is Wild Pansy.

That settled that.

*Although it has at least one potentially boffo female role: Dolley Madison, whom I'd like to see played by Jennifer Ehle.

**That's an actual piece of knitting -- whole or fragment -- that has survived to the present day.

***Or punch you.

by Franklin Habit, translated from The Floral Knitting Book; or, The Art of Knitting Imitations of Natural Flowers
by C. E. A. J. (1847)

One

FINISHED MEASUREMENTS

MATERIALS
Yarn
Austermann Step Classic [75% Superwash Wool, 25% Polyamid; 420m per 110g skein]
[C1] color: 1019; 1 skein
[C2] color: 1022; 1 skein
[C3] color: 1014; 1 skein
Note: The boutonnière uses only very small amounts of each color. For C1, the main color, 20 yards will suffice; for C2 and C3, 10 yds is generous. Investigate the scraps in your stash!

Recommended needle size
[always use a needle size that gives you the gauge listed below -- every knitter's gauge is unique]
US 00000/1mm double-point needles

DIRECTIONS