Elizabethan Knitting: A Monmouth Cap

It's probably safe to say that knitting isn't going to be a hobby I'll be continuing on with in any serious way. Every craft is essentially built on the premise that the particular sort of fussiness and tedium that it brings to the table sits just below your tolerance level for monotony. Knitting is just not my particular brand of tedium.

I'm sure that's not the last time I'll say that.

Be that as it may, it's time to finish off the Monmouth cap and move on to the next craft.

Just a reminder that I'm using a pattern provided by historical knitter Jennifer L. Carlson here with some backup from The Engineer's years of experience and her multi-volume knitting library. We've taken some minor liberties with the pattern (like you do) and I'll get into those below.

The results might be imperfect, but as I always say when crediting sources in the afterword of a book: My sources are infallible within their professional realms, my hands are less so; any errors are my own.

The Monmouth Cap

For her demo hat, Ms. Carlson used Lion brand "Quick & Thick" yarn, which The Engineer tells me is a synthetic fiber. To get a similar gauge, she advised me to switch to wool and use two strands instead of one.

At some point, I plan to card and spin my own yarn (Woolmen's Company, here I come!) but for this project we're working "off the shelf" with Paton's Merino Wool in an 'oatmeal' color. It's a worsted weight, size #4 wool, 3.5 ounces per 223 yards. All of which is essentially meaningless to me, but she tells me it's important information for other knitters.

Working with double-strands is a bit of a pain in the butt, or at least it was for me. I kept getting the needle through one loop of the two and having to back up to where I dropped half a stitch. The Engineer tells me that my problem is that I'm a "tight knitter" and I need to ease off the tension a bit.

Step one: Cast 90 stitches onto three double-pointed needles like we did here. Leave an extra long tail, because Monmouth caps traditionally have a weird loop at the back because early modern knitters enjoyed having a big tail of trailing wool to get tangled in.

I know what everyone is thinking: Yes, I have a snoopy lap quilt. You may die of envy now.

Three needles is because this project is knitted "in the round", though as you can see, they should call it "in the triangle" because that's what it is. (The Engineer tells me I'm not allowed to rename centuries-old knitting procedures, but I think Pythagoras has my back on this one.)

The little pale pink, blue, and white circle thingies are stitch-counters. They're that color because knitting companies like to discourage male knitters, I think. I placed them every ten stitches.  Make sure to mark your beginning because it's how you're going to count as you go round and round.

Step two: Knit for five inches, moving round and round from needle to needle. Do this by knitting onto a fourth needle. As you work the stitches off each needle, that one becomes the fourth needle in your... square.

Okay, it's knitting "In the polygon" are you happy? It's still not a circle. (Fist bumps Pythagoras.)

Note: A small tablet computer isn't really mandatory for this process, though it's handy if you want to consult your online pattern without dragging out a real computer. Also: you can watch endless repetitions of favorite TV shows you've seen a million times before. The Engineer assures me that this is an integral part of knitting that I'm not allowed to mess with. Who am I to argue?

By the way: This pattern doesn't use the purl stitch, so I guess we learned that for nothing.

Step Three: When you get about five inches into your knitting, you can get that blasted tail out of your way by turning it into "I-cord", which is knitting back and forth four stitches at a time to make (basically) a teeny-tiny scarf, which you'll weave back into the middle of the bit of hat you've knitted for your loop.

I didn't take any pictures of that because I forgot to do it. I put up with that stupid long tail for the whole of the hat and then did it last. If you decide to make one of these hats, you should do as I say, not as I do.

Then you'll fold your knitting in half and knit the ends together to form the headband. The patterns warns that "this is the tricky part" which is an understatement. I think that the biggest problem was that I'm knitting with doubled yarn, so instead of picking up two stitches, I'm picking up for.

I managed it without screwing up for all of four stitches before handing it to The Engineer, in peril of my immortal soul from all the sublimated cursing.

We didn't take pictures of that either. (sigh)  Ms Carlson has plenty of excellent pictures of this process on her site, though.

Step Four: Just keep swimming. knit and knit and knit and knit, round and round and round he goes until you have something that you can kinda/sorta put on your head...

It's helpful if you can hypnotize the cat to sleep and ignore the bag of jelly beans next to him. 

Step Five: Reductions. On row 46, you'll start the kind of knitting that you have hitherto treated as a grievous error. This means you'll knit as usual for four stitches and then force your needle through two stitches at once, thus reducing the number of stitches on your needle and the circumference of your circle.

Yes, the knitted results of your triangle/square/amorphous polygon is a circle. That's why they call it knitting in the round, of course. Sorry Pythagoras, it was a good run and a thousand years of knitters are sneering at us for questioning their collective wisdom.

Kids these days! I tell you...

These reductions happen gradually. First knitting together every four stitches, then every three, then every two and finally all of them until you have aching hands and a headache from passing a half dozen stitches between three needles THAT ARE JUST TOO DARNED LARGE TO DO THIS WITH!

(Deep breath.)

At this point, you can cast off to form a button as she indicates in the pattern, or you get to switch to a big needle and sew it together like I did.

Jelly beans aren't mandatory, but are advised for sustaining the soul while knitting.

As you can see, my results were a bit big, so we felted it. 

I'll go into the science of fulling/felting when we get to weaving. At the moment, we'll suffice to say that it's about agitating your knitted object in a basin of hot water with some kind of medium (we used detergent) to get the wool fibers to shrink and lock together into a more or less solid mass that you can then drape over a form to dry.

I'm rather proud of it and looking forward to never having to do it again because that wraps up the cappers guild and rounds off the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers. 

As you can see in the background there, I'm remodeling a kitchen and we have the worshipful companies of carpentry and joinery ahead of us. Sooner for me than for you, as you can see...

~ Scott

Haberdashers, cappers, and the history of the stocking cap

"Your majesty says very true: if your majestie is remembered of it, the Welshmen did good service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps; which, your majesty knows, to this hour is an honourable badge of the service; and I do believe your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Davy's day."
                                - William Shakespeare
                                  Henry V

I suppose that I am a few days late for St Davy's day, that festival of Monmouth caps (and caps of every sort) festooned with leeks across the length and breadth of Wales.  The reason Shakespeare has Fluellen so jazzed to be speaking with the king about allium-adorned headgear is that King Harry was a man of Wales himself, born in Monmouth in the Year of Our Lord 1386.

But this isn't a tale about leeks. This is about a cap born of that same fertile corner of the Sceptered Isle, or at least named for it. The Monmouth Cap is nearly alone among Elizabethan headwear insomuch as you could walk down the street wearing one and no one would look at you twice. To the modern eye, it would seem, for all intents and purposes, to be a sort of wool watch cap not unlike the ones you see me wearing in a lot of photos.

Though I'm not above wearing a fedora if it's sunny and I need to shade my eyes, stocking caps (as my dad called them) are hands-down my favorite sort of cap for woodworking outside in the cold and damp of my Western Washington home. This is part of why I decided to make one as my first real knitting project.

There are as many patterns for Monmouth Caps as there are knitters trying to produce them. If you go looking on Ravelry, you will find any number of them on display.  The one I'm going is distilled from many of those projects, but mostly one featured onthe website of Jennifer Carlson.

http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~marc-carlson/jennifer/Monmouth.htm

I'm a big fan of the website maintained by Jennifer and Marc Carlson and will be referring you to their fine resources on diverse topics ranging from shoemaking to hornwork to medieval stitches. They are a font of knowledge and generous with sharing it all, almost to a fault.

The Cappers

The reason we're making a cap is to tie off the last of the Haberdasher's Company by discussing the duality that exists to this day.

Piled Fedoras - Byrnie Utz Hats, Seattle

Photo by Kristin Perkins

Walk into famed Seattle haberdashery Byrnie Utz and you will get the impression that haberdasher = hatseller. And in the United States for the most part, that is true. Sometimes you will find assorted men's fashions as well, but always, always, always there will be hats.

(Note: Normally I would link to them, but I can't because they're so old school they don't have a website or even a social media presence. If you want to see it, you just have to make the trip.)

As we've already discussed, historically, the haberdasher was a seller of small household goods and sewing notions. Which is not to make them seem small themselves, they rank eighth in precedence on the great roll of the City of London's livery companies and have been, at times, enormously powerful. Nevertheless, they were mainly the merchants of ribbons, pins, beads, buttons, purses, thread, combs, toys, gloves, and even sometimes household goods and even cutlery.

Almost a general store, to put it in American frontier terms.

They overlapped the Mercer's Company on many fronts and it's often said that they were spun off from that fraternity, though their own official history makes no mention of it. Like the Mercers, though, they were the retailers for many other trades, least among them the humble Pinners and perhaps greatest among them the Pewterers and Cutlers.

There are many theories on the history of the word 'haberdasher', and if I can find my magnifier, I'll quote some of them at you from my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, but the one that I think rings truest is handily online. "Anglo-French hapertas 'small wares'".

In 1502, right at the start of the 16th century, the Cappers Guild either joined with or was absorbed by the Haberdashers, but they never completely soaked in. As a result there came about two schools of haberdashery. On the one hand we had sellers of small household wares and on the other were the hat emporia that I so greatly enjoy today.

Tonight, we sleep. Tomorrow, we knit!

~ Scott

Failure at my fingertips: Thimble making is harder than it looks...

First of all, from one time traveler to another, happy 79th birthday to Tom Baker, better known to some as the 4th Doctor and to many as "That British guy with the hat and the crazy scarf..."

Aside from being my first Doctor, he was also a gifted Shakespearean actor and a member of Sir Laurence Olivier's company. I'd give anything to see him play Lear. Regardless of all that, to me and millions of others, he's the mad man in the blue box.

From the other crazy hat/scarf guy getting himself lost in the time stream, many, many more happy years, sir.
Seriously, folks. If you didn't realize I was geek by now, you just haven't been paying close enough attention.

It's time to talk about finger helmets.

I experienced the first abject failure of the project today. I was attempting to make thimbles based on the Jost Amman illustration of the thimble maker from his Book of Trades. I've reproduced the tools in the etching using hardwood, but the brass keeps tearing out at the bottom of the die.

"Der Fingerhueter", from Das Ständebuch by Jost Amman

Boom. Failure.

Is it that modern brass is softer than what these chaps are using? Do I need a thicker gauge? Should I make the dapping block out of iron instead of hardwood?

A book on the history of trumpet making (of all things) includes an aside on the above image, and some information on the making of thimbles, because it relates to the valves of the trumpet. The author proposes that the brass was 1 mm thick, which is roughly twice the thickness of the brass I've been using.

Ah well. Better luck tomorrow.

In the meantime, it is time to start multi-tasking or I'll never make it.  A least not with out cloning myself and the Calvin & Hobbes trick with the cardboard box didn't work. Might've needed more tigers.

Thankfully, while I was failing miserably at the fine art of thimbling, the books on coopering arrived from England. So, after I gave up on making finger helmets, I spent some time knocking together a shaving horse.

Here's a video for going on with. It's done by Kari Hultman, who is the woodworker behind the fantastic "Village Carpenter" blog. It's an extended interview and demonstration of coopering at Colonial Williamsburg, including the shaving horse I'm working on...

Here's to a more successful day tomorrow!

~Scott

Ramona Vogel: Journeyman Cooper at Colonial Williamsburg from Kari Hultman on Vimeo.

In Search of a Haystack: Pin Making Part II

As you know, we had a power outage that was compounded by power issues in the house proper that kept us mostly without power until around 3:00 pm today. Which meant that I would have to adhere rather more closely to my pledge for period methods than even I anticipated. For instance, when I was making the die for cold-forging the heads of the pins, I had to haul out the eggbeater drill I inherited from my dad. (I'd have used a bow drill but I don't have one.)

Fate is a big fan of dramatic irony.

Anyway: Part II of our ongoing quest to build the ultimate angel disco...

The bone, as it turns out is invaluable in this effort. Whether or not it needs to be bone is an open question. Now that I've done this, I can imagine why the Tudor pinners used bones. They were cheap and plentiful, they are incredibly dense, and plastic hadn't been invented yet. Antler or horn would've worked, but horn had other more valuable uses and antler came from deer, access to which were controlled by the nobility.

These days, if you want to do this, you could use just about anything dense enough to resist the teeth of the files.

The wire sits in the grooves that I carved into the bone. The grooves are angled between 10 and 20 degrees. The wire sits at that angle and you run a fine file along as you roll it with your fingers, creating a nice round taper as you feed it into the teeth of the file.

The bone acts to shield the parts of the pin you want to retain, allowing the files to
take away anything that stands proud of the surface.

It's easier to do than it is to explain. In short order, with a nice, sharp file, you can make an astonishingly sharp pin.

That's easy enough, right?  The tricky bit isn't putting the point on the pin. The tricky bit is putting a head on the darned thing...

In the episode of "Worst Jobs In History: The Tudor Age" that showed Bodger Hodgeson and his crew making pins, they flatten the top a bit to give you something to drag. Then, using a pliers, you twist a three rounds of softer brass wire round the shaft, tin it, and then cold-forge it between a die and a stamp.

In Bodger's pin making shop, they seem to be making springs and cutting them into bits of three turns each. I'm not mass-producing them at this point, so I just wrapped it around.

I made my anvil and stamp by drilling impressions into a couple of enormous bold heads that I utterly failed to take pictures of. Here's the general idea illustrated, though. Probably better than any picture could show.

Cold Forging: A stamp and an anvil with matching depressions
form theball at the top when the stamp is struck with a hammer.

Below is the first pin I made, I used some lead-free solder as Bodger showed (he's using tin, but I didn't have a forge fire laid to melt tin, so I used solder). I think tin will work better on many levels because it's so much more malleable than solder can be.

The second pin I made used considerably less solder, really just enough to fix the wire twist in place.

Summaries and "What I learned" will be posted later this week. It's been a crazy weekend and I hear friends playing games in the next room, so I must away to join in the fun.

~Scott