As a child, I thought of knitting as a kind of magic, in which a one-dimensional object became two-dimensional or even three-dimensional. While you watched, a very long piece of string somehow turned into a hat or a sock or a mitten, something with shape and weight, an inside and an outside. Appropriately, this transformation was accomplished with long shiny sticks, like the magic wands in fairy tales.

It wasn’t only the materials that, for me, were transformed. The people who could perform this magic seemed, in everyday life, to be everyday humans. But when they picked up their wands they turned into sorceresses or fairy godmothers, mistresses of a secret art.

My mother, like most of her friends, could knit, but she much preferred sewing, and made charming clothes for my and my sister’s dolls on her old treadle Singer. When I was seven she tried to teach me to knit, but without success. Under her reluctant instruction I managed about twelve inches of a lumpy scarf in alternating wobbly stripes of brown and canary-yellow garter stitch. Then I gave up, and for several years refused to try again.

My mother was of Scottish descent, and always reluctant to waste anything. After a while she took over the wool and created an afghan of alternating brown and canary-yellow squares. It was one of the few knitting projects she ever completed, but it lasted for a long time. It was admired and even loved by my younger sister and eventually by both her children and mine when they were small. For one of them it temporally became a beloved and comforting ”blankie,” or as psychologists call it, a “transitional object.” Only I never liked the thing, no doubt because it reminded me of my wonky failed scarf.

Eventually, a friend of my mother’s managed to teach me to knit in the rapid European method, in which the yarn is held in the left hand and there is less movement of the arms. My first project was also a scarf, but this time a more successful one, in a light, soft, blue wool.

* * *

According to historians, knitting is probably very old. Few ancient examples have survived, though socks from Egypt are believed to date from the eleventh century. Archaeologists have found many more woven textiles, but it seems likely that knitting may predate weaving. Weaving demands a settled environment, and bulky equipment in the form of a loom. Knitting requires only a ball of yarn and needles, and it would therefore be well suited to nomadic people who followed the migrations of game or the seasonal ripening of fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Knitters can and still do carry their work with them: even today you will often see women knitting on long journeys.

By the late Middle Ages, knitting was well-established. A fourteenth-century painting by Bertram von Minden shows the Virgin Mary finishing up what looks like a loose pink short-sleeved top. Weavers and seamstresses typically work sitting down, but it is possible to knit while standing, or even while walking. It can also be done when it is too dark to sew, something that was especially important before the invention of electricity. Shepherds and shepherdesses traditionally knit as they watched their flocks, and there are many seventeenth-, eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century paintings of women in peasant dress knitting, often while standing up. Back then, it wasn’t just a hobby, as it often is today, but an essential household craft. Many women (and occasionally men) either created wool socks, scarves, and sweaters for themselves and their families, or went without.

Since it did not demand physical strength, knitting was something you could do at any age, and to judge by the art of the period, the very young and the very old were frequent knitters. Some not only supplied their families but also made things for sale, including fine silk stockings for the rich. “Young Knitter Asleep,” a painting by the eighteenth-century French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) shows a little girl, about seven years old, who has dozed off over this monotonous task.

Crochet, patterns for which first appeared in the early nineteenth century, was at first a very different kind of handcraft. It belonged to what was referred to often as “fancy work,” which included tatting, tapestry, and embroidery. The important thing about fancy work was that it was both artistic and unnecessary. It was a characteristic leisure occupation of well-to-do women who did not have to create anything essential. Instead they demonstrated their taste and skill by making decorative objects: embroidered handkerchiefs and slippers, crocheted lace for edgings and trimmings, little net purses, doilies and runners for tables, and fancy antimacassars for sofas and chairs. Knitting was practical and plebian; fancy work was largely decorative, and prestigiously useless.

In nineteenth-century literature, it’s often true that good women knit and bad women crochet or do fancy work. In Jane Austen’s “Emma,” the long-suffering good girl, Jane Fairfax, is a dedicated knitter, as is her aunt, Miss Bates. (Emma herself does not knit.) Hester in Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” is a self-supporting single mother who knits and sews for a living. On the other hand, Thackeray’s anti-heroine Becky Sharp, in “Vanity Fair,” practices fine netting in order to show off her long white fingers and captivate Josiah Sedley.

In Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” Levin’s loyal and lovable wife, Kitty, knits while she is in labor with her first child. Anna herself crochets nervously and automatically as she confronts her lover, Count Vronsky, who has just returned from a party:

“…You don’t know what I have suffered waiting for you. I believe I’m not jealous. I’m not jealous: I believe you when you’re here; but when you’re away somewhere leading your life, so incomprehensible to me…” She turned away from him, pulled the hook at last out of the crochet work, and rapidly, with the help of her forefinger, began working loop after loop of the wool that was dazzling white in the lamplight, while the slender wrist moved swiftly, nervously in the embroidered cuff.

The virtuousness of knitting was emphasized in wartime, when even well-to-do women were encouraged to knit for the troops. In Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” both Jo and Beth do so during the Civil War, Beth happily and uncomplainingly and Jo with some irritation.