Autumn Printable

A Stitcher’s Alphabet Part 9: S ( part two)

Sailors’ Woollies

Nothing to do with maritime knitwear, sailors’ woollies are embroideries worked by sailors in the nineteenth century. They appear to have been made both at sea to while away long periods of inactivity when the sailing ships were becalmed in the doldrums and also as a pastime when the maker had retired from the sea. They began to be created in the 1830s and remained popular until the end of the First World War in 1918.

Sailors designed the woollies themselves, usually drawing the image in ink first, and then filling it in with their needle and thread. Although all the materials – cloth and thread – could be found onboard, it seems instead that sailors often saved up their money to buy embroidery canvas (rather than use the tougher sailcloth), and colourful silk threads that cheaper dying processes had made more affordable. They also experimented a little, with some adding sequins, glass beads, and bits of bone and metal sometimes into their work. However, they did tend to be economical with materials – they favoured the long stitch, which was fast and made the most of their thread since it involved long stitches on the front and only short ones on the back. They are generally naïve representations of the ships in which the worker had sailed, nearly always in profile and always sailing straight into the wind with strreaming flags and bunting.