Travelling Stitches: Linda Ligon on Knitting Traditions and Innovation in the Andes

In the Spring 1998 issue of Interweave Knits magazine, you’ll find this Ravelings essay, “Travelling Stitches,” from Interweave’s founder, Linda Ligon. We are sharing her words and bio as they were written nearly 25 years ago. We also share Linda’s curiosity about how people learn to knit around the world. Enjoy!

Above: Image source – Getty Images

Listen: Linda Ligon’s Tales of Travel on Fiber Nation Podcast

Travelling Stitches

What I want to know is how women in the Andes learned to knit. I don’t mean as a cultural thing, but as individuals. And I don’t mean how to do knit-purl, but how to make intricate sweaters and shawls from every knitting tradition imaginable, with no recorded patterns. 

I’ve travelled in Bolivia and Peru in recent years, and being a knitter, one of the first things I’ve noticed is that everybody wears great-looking wool sweaters. And I do mean everybody. This is not a class thing. Traditional women in handwoven skirts and odd black derbies with babies on their backs also wear under their traditional ruanas, cabled pullovers with intricate decreases. Men in rubber-tire sandals, cotton pants, and handspun ponchos pushing wagon loads of produce also sport handsome ganseys and GQ-worthy alpaca cardigans. Travelling stitches, intarsia, argyle, fancy ribs—you see it all on the streets and in the markets of Cusco or LaPaz.  

Related: Travel Tips for Knitters

Skillful Multi-taskers

You also see these items being made. Women tending market stalls and minding a flock of children are knitting. Women on park benches peddling odds and ends are knitting. Women on cathedral steps with baby llamas or lambs wrapped in their shawls, waiting for tourists with cameras, are knitting. They’re knitting out of their heads, or maybe just out of their hands, without looking, without referring to patterns. They’re knitting while making conversation or making change. They’re knitting intricate circular lace shawls, sweaters, vests, baby caps, socks. They’re using handspun natural wool, llama, or alpaca, or they’re using gaudy acrylics.  

Now, I know there are a lot of European traditions that involve prolific, facile knitting—the color-stranded sweaters of Scandinavia, the fisherman sweaters of the Channel Isles, the socks and gloves of Northern England. There, women (and sometimes men) also knitted automatically with ease while sauntering about or whatever. The difference, as I see it, is they knitted only one kind of thing. Knitters had their own variations on the standard, but if a traditional Aran knitter suddenly abandoned her intricate cabled pullovers in favor of brightly patterned cropped boleros, I haven’t heard about it. 

Related: Craft as Contemplation

Where Did They Learn It?

The women of the Andean altiplano, on the other hand, adopt all styles with wild abandon. They do have a longstanding knitting tradition, it’s true—but it mostly involves fine, fine color-patterned caps in either handspun cotton or wool with earflaps and a pointed, tasseled crown. You expect to see and marvel over those. Yet I also saw, for instance, an elderly woman on a street corner in LaPaz doing an entrelac sweater in bright pink and lime green. Where did she learn this/ What was she thinking? And where did younger mothers pick up the trick of knitting kinky-spiraled pigtail bows for their little girls, just like the ones you find at craft bazaars here? And how do the lace shawl knitters keep track of their yarn-overs while weighing chicken giblets in the markets? Did their grandmothers teach them lace knitting? 

I don’t know the answers; maybe you do. It’s wonderfully paradoxical, though, to see such lighthearted, enthusiastic innovation in a culture where fields are still planted by oxen and transportation is more likely to be by burro than by automobile. And it’s awe-inspiring to see it all happen so intuitively and skillfully.  

Related: Travel Ideas for Yarn Lovers

Linda Ligon was editorial director of Interweave Knits. She’s grateful that she’s not trying to publish a knitting-pattern magazine in South America. After all, who would need it? 

Originally published in Interweave Knits Spring 1998.