Knitting

The Knitting Frame

In the photo below Peter Clowes is sitting at a framework knitting machine in the Wigston Frame Knitters Museum. It produces a flat piece of material and the design of these machines goes back to 1589.

Hear the sound of a framework knitter.wma

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The conditions of the 'stockingers' who worked with these machines in homes and workshops, were notoriously bad in mid nineteenth century Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, and it wasn't until an upturn in the market for knitted goods in the later 1800's that their lot improved. By the 1900's almost all knitted goods were produced in factories, and although a few framework knitters were employed in factories even into the 1930's, this method of production had all but disappeared in the space of a few decades.

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