THE GOLDEN AGE OF WOOLCRAFT

DYLAN OWEN

DESCRIPTION Aotea Knitting Pattern 7256, late 1960s–early 1970s

MAKER / ARTIST Mosgiel Woollens Ltd

REFERENCE Eph-A-KNITAotea-7256 The Aotea wool brand was part of the Otagobased Mosgiel Woollen Mills empire in the years before synthetic fabrics and low-cost imported garments killed off home knitting.

Once upon a time, when the world knew Aotearoa New Zealand mainly for its sheep, every New Zealander had woollen clothes in their wardrobe and every city and major town had a wool shop. The latest woollen fashions weren’t purchased from a shop or online; they were handknitted by you or by your mum.

Between the 1950s and 1980s, knitting patterns like this were purchased in their tens of thousands. Tank tops, hot pants, ponchos, balaclavas, bed jackets, bellbottoms, twinsets—the patterns gave home knitters the opportunity to produce fashionable woollen clothes for themselves and their families. New Zealand woollen textile companies, such as Mosgiel Woollens Ltd, with its Aotea brand shown here, used knitting patterns to promote their wool yarns, the idea being that you knitted the pattern with the yarn recommended on the front cover.

This was the golden age of woolcraft, and wool was a significant primary industry in New Zealand. In 1955, the Auckland department store Milne and Choyce recorded a stock of some 19,000 kilometres of wool yarns. Thirty years later, the country’s sheep numbers peaked at just over 70 million. This was also the era of national wool weeks, knitting competitions and fashion parades. For a while, New Zealand was the world’s largest exporter of spinning wheels.

Knitting patterns typically comprised four pages. An aspirational cover featured a model or models wearing the completed knitwear, while the back frequently advertised other knitting patterns in the series. Inside, the instructions to knit the patterned garment were written in a language resembling software code—1st row: (right side). K1, pl, *k3, p1*, rep from *to* until 1 st rems, k1.

Today, knitting is a recreational activity, not a necessity — the advent of cheap, commercially manufactured knitwear and fast fashion has seen to that. However, there have been comeback spikes in popularity this century, including the social knitting movement stitch and bitch, the hipster handmade ethos and, more recently, the surge in knitcraft activity during the 2020 national Covid-19 lockdown.

The hundreds of knitting patterns held at the library are a reminder of the extraordinary popularity of knitting. Even in the mid-1980s, seven out of ten New Zealand households could claim an active home knitter. In addition, a look through the pattern covers offers an interesting lens on fashion, hairstyles and ethnic and gender stereotypes over the decades.