Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I shall move the world. — Archimedes
One of the best ways to scare a knitter or crocheter is to sneak up behind them (while they have yarn and needles/hook in their hands, of course) and yell, “Arthritis!!!”.
I (unfortunately) don’t have the most scientific mind; I don’t understand my own hands very well. Despite having physical therapist in my immediate family, I had to look up the difference between tendons and ligaments just now. But knitting for over a decade will leave a mark (trust me, I’ve tried it).
I was in middle school when my joints first introduced themselves to me, in the form of soreness, cramps, and sharp pain along the backs of my hands. The physical therapist (Dad) told me to take a break from knitting, which I gladly (and yet reluctantly) did. While my memory may be hazy, I think I was back at it again in a week.
As I practiced techniques, attended baby showers, and received commissions for various objects, the pains and cramps became part of a recurring cycle, sometimes appearing more spectacularly than others and always in context of what had seemed like a good idea at the time—like filling an order for twenty Christmas stockings. (Which actually was a good idea, as it turned out; but that, as Kipling would say, is another story.) I would knit blissfully for a few weeks, swept up in what could be called the fury of the finished object; and then, as soon as the piece was done, or sooner, the aches would set in and I would have to sit project-less, idle and fidgeting, on the couch during movie or read-aloud night.
And to add insult to injury, story after story of pre-industrial production knitting seemed to taunt me malevolently—men and women with a living to make and tots to feed, knitting all day long, six days a week, with eight- to twelve-hour work days, and producing masterpieces like this…
…or this…
…or this…
The last piece is a carpet dated 1781, approximately 3 yards long by 2 meters wide, using nearly twenty colors and believed to have been knit in less than thirteen weeks by a journeyman seeking entrance into a professional knitting guild. Obviously I have made a minor edit to the image (remember that Adam and Eve, whom this carpet depicts, didn’t wear clothes before the Fall…) but the point is sufficiently made. Thirteen weeks.
How did they do it?
And then there were the paintings. They all showed knitters of the past holding their yarn and needles as I had been taught—English style—or Continental, which I had tried to no improvement. I wasn’t doing anything differently than those superhuman knitters (or so I thought). Behold!
And so the mental-physical cycle went, until, about nine months ago, I stumbled across this tutorial by Felicia Lo Wong of SweetGeorgia Yarns. In it she described a technique called lever or Irish cottage knitting, in which the right-hand needle is held in a pencil grip. She described it in terms of learning to knit faster (many of the fastest knitters in the world use this grip in competition—yep, there are competitions), which sounded great to me; but a little further research led to a veritable yelp of joy.
According to lever/Irish cottage expert Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, this style of knitting was the standard method of holding yarn and needles in the pre-industrial West, with the rapid, fluid motions and ergonomic grip permitting the long days and weeks of knitting for a living over the span of a lifetime. Today’s standard English and Continental methods, known respectively as ‘throwing’ and ‘picking’, were developed for wealthy women after the industrial revolution as a more ‘elegant’ way to knit. For these hobbyists, the less-ergonomic hand position was a negligible hazard.
Not so for me, as I learned. I also learned that pride goeth before a fall, and that I should not have poked fun for so many years at the knitters I saw in period dramas, whom I thought were ‘doing it wrong’.
Using Felicia’s tutorial, I learned to knit lever-style in under a week with only minor hiccups (my gauge was a little tighter than usual for about ten days) and have since said goodbye to hand cramps. Sometimes after months of constant knitting my wrists feel pinched and my hands are tired; but now knitting a giant lace shawl in four weeks seems like less of a bad idea. Some personally find lever knitting uncomfortable and I don’t dispute it; but in my humble opinion, if Archimedes had been a knitter the saying would have gone something like this—give me lever knitting and a place to sit, and I shall knit the world.
