Hats off! Fair Isle beret meets Tam O'Shanter

With Sheila's admonishments still ringing in my ears I just felt I had to try harder at circular knitting. At the end of  her book a spread of amazing knitted "tammy" hats in fantastic concentric Fair Isle patterns were said to be much easier to make than to describe. That they relied on a double slip stitch decrease was all the information given. I set off to make a small hat for a child and along the way I met some very interesting people.

As I began, I got curious about why these hats are called "Tammies" and  who exactly was Tam O'Shanter? and I finally got round to reading the epic Robert Burns poem. Only half comprehending it, even in translation, I gather he was a bit of a lad for the booze and the ladies who got a bad scare to the detriment of  his horse. His "good blue bonnet" apparently referred to a Kilmarnock bonnet, - heavy duty head gear from which a man would seldom be parted inside or outside.

O dear! by then  I'm totally hooked into finding out more about the mysteries of  these knitted Scottish bonnets.  Historical hats were coming thick and fast from Glengarry's and Atholl's  in regimental dress to berets and forage caps. Fascinating.... you can read more about how they were made at
http://futuremuseum.co.uk/Collection.aspx/bonnet_making/Description

Sally Pointer is also something of an expert when it comes recreating these historical caps and she has some interesting traditional tools too. See  http://www.sallypointer.com/shop/

For this little effort I started off using trusty James Norbury's instructions for beret shaping. So this hat has a tight rim, rather than a rib and is increased out before turning back in for the crown. But then I discovered Ruskin on Ravelry whose splendid Greenvoe pattern explained that knitting a straight tube and then decreasing just within the central crown would do the job. The centre shaping is more Ruskin that Norbury and I completed the job by gentle  washing and drying it to shape over a plate. I decided against a pom pom as this quite a lightweight little hat for maybe a two/three year old. 

As Sheila said in her book making one is a lot easier than it looks or is to describe. I'll try to add an outline of how I made it on the patterns page as soon as I can.

Traditional Knitting by Sheila McGregor and a teeny tiny Fair Isle baby bonnet

Premie size Fair Isle baby hat in yellow and brown

I had a stroke of  luck this week when I came across a book about traditional knitting by Sheila McGregor. I had been on the look out for anything by her since I acquired "Michael Parson's Traditional Knitting" when I was on holiday in Scotland last  year.

If it had been her "Complete Book of Fair Isle Knitting" I would have been over the moon, still I am pretty chuffed to have laid my hands on this 1983 Batsford Paperback - "Traditional Knitting" for just 25p. While only quite a short book Sheila's take on the history of  knitting is well researched and written with some wry humour.

I'm fascinated by the different theories surrounding the development and spread of  knitting techniques and patterns around the globe. There seems to be very little hard and fast evidence and the folklore surrounding "traditional" patterns varies according to where you are asking. Do we owe Fair Isle knitting to the Spanish or the Vikings?  Sheila suggestion is that the source was more likely to have been Estonia.

One thing that stands out from the book for me is the importance of felting. It had never occurred to me that not only hats but most of  those hand knit stockings were felted. The book reminds us that knitting is basically a circular technique and Sheila's parting paragraph says very much about what I think of as "Joined Up Knitting"

"....knitting is in many ways an ideal craft for today. It is no longer true that it has to be economically worthwhile; it is sufficient in itself. The varying levels of skill can explored (if knitters would only lift their eyes from their paper patterns and read a little about the basic). Not the least thing, the end result is useful as well as beautiful and, we would hope, unique."

The are lots of fascinating colour pictures in the book, but here we will have to make do with an image of  my own first attempt at Fair Isle hand knitting last year. I started off at random really, trying out some circular knitting on four pins and some contrasting oddments and just trying to make changes as I went along. It turned out as a very small hat about right for a premie baby, so I sent it off to South Africa with some knitted blankets. squares.
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