Amble harbour inspires local business to resurrect fishermen's favoured knit

Villages such as Seahouses, Craster, Amble and Newbiggin all had their own distinctive design of intricate stitches making up a gansey or Guernsey knitted sweater.

In fishing families, girls would be taught to knit from a young age, able to produce socks from five years old, and graduating to ganseys at about 12.

Patterns were committed to memory rather than paper.

The 5-ply pure wool combined with narrow gauge needles, made for a taut fabric giving the gansey its ability to turn water.

With the advent of man-made fibres and cheap mass-produced clothing, interest died out in the traditional close-fitting, usually seamless garment, often knitted in dark blue, and taking around 160 hours to make.

Nowadays, the Heritage Crafts Association has Guernsey or gansey knitting on their red list of endangered crafts.

Amble Pin Cushion’s Anne Baxter was asked to design an introductory Guernsey knitting project, using traditional 5-ply 100% British wool, thereby supporting a renewable home industry at a difficult time.

The brief was to develop a product which would appeal to those who are new to this style of knitting, as well as those interested in heritage knits.

A home accessory instead of a garment seemed to best fit the bill.

Anne developed two new products. Her cushion cover and tablet cover designs, whilst being based on traditional fisherman’s gansey stitches, such as the tree of life, take inspiration for their combination of stitch patterns from in and around Amble harbour, where ropes, nets, anchors and ladders are often seen.

The dolphin on the back of the cushion cover is ‘Freddie’, famous in Amble from 1987 to 1992.

Both designs were made up as kits and entered into the 2020 British Knitting and Crochet Awards.

The cushion cover received ‘highly commended’ and the full results are in the December issue of ‘Let’s Knit’ magazine.

Amble Pin Cushion has added these Guernsey knitting kits to their Northumbria Knit and Stitch brand, which also includes a wide range of Northumbrian cross stitch designs from their Picrosso range.

These are all available from the Queen Street shop and at https://amblepincushion.co.uk/

Earlier this year, the business was nominated in the British Sewing Awards for best independent haberdashery shop in the North East.

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