Yorkshire Crafts

Traditional Yorkshire Crafts

Rag rugs
Also known as clippy rugs, peg rugs and proddy mats, rag rugs were the original household recycling activity. They are made out of small scraps of cloth cut into strips which are pushed through a piece of sacking with a pointed wooden tool to form tufts. Often the colours were just randomly distributed but sometimes they were formed into brightly coloured geometrical designs. A large rag rug would be found in front of the range in many working class households, from minors cottages to Dales farmhouses. Smaller strips were used as draught excluders along the bottoms of doors and the Dent museum has some nice circular seat covers made by the same technique. The tradition seems to have been strongest in West Yorkshire where clipping and lengths of selvedge from the textile mills were widely available, but were also associated with fishing districts such as Whitby and were made across the Dales.

Quilting and Patchwork

A quilt from Yeadon, W.Yorks
in the Quilters Guild Collection

The quilting tradtion most strongly associated with the North East also extended into parts of Yorkshire. For reasons I have not been able to establish quilt making seems to be particularly strong in mining areas, whether the coal mines of the North East, the Scottish lowlands, South Wales or the leadmines of Swaledale. They also stretched into neighbouring rural areas like Weardale and the Scottish borders. Many Yorkshire quilts are of the strippy type or the distinctive monochrome white and turkey red quilt. In fishing districts women often wore quilted petticoats, whose designs were drawn from wholecloth quilts. The Beamish museum holds examples from the northern parts of Yorkshire and examples are also held by small local museums like the Swaledale Museum in Reeth and the Beck Isle museum in Pickering.

Knitting
There was a small industry in the Yorkshire Dales in the 19th century knitting socks, caps, gloves and that kind of thing. I can remember when I was trying to learn to knit as a child being told by my grandad that it was 'like the Terrible Knitters of Dent'. 'Terrible' in this instance meant very skilled and fast. Knitting for Dent folk was definitely not a hobby but a desperate attempt to make ends meet in this most isolated of dales, where most households had to supplement the meagre income from hill-farming . All the family knitted, continuing knitting in the dark and even under the bedcovers when the candles had gone out. The women knitted as they walked around and performed domestic tasks. They could knit at an immense speed, knitting in time to traditional knitting songs and counting with the Dales counting systems used by shepherds to count their sheep. The use of these systems stretches across the Dales and Cumbria and share similarities with Welsh, suggesting that

Knitters in front of the Parish Church, Dent

they date back to pre-Roman times when a Brythonic language was used by the Celtic peoples of this area. They used traditional goosewing knitting sticks tucked into the belt to hold the needle. Dent folk were too pooorr to afford proper needles and made them instead from wire bought from the hardware shop. They sharpened these on the stones of the fireplaces. Apparently marks left by this process can still be seen in some farmhouses in the Dale. Whilst walking, the abllolf wool wwas hung from the waist on a clew hook. They made both plain, coarse every-day items and high-quality fine, patterned items which share similarities with the Sanquhar and Fairisle traditions. These tended to be in a two-colour scheme of natural white and dark wools  Good examples can be seen in the Reeth, Hawes and Dent museums.

In quite a separate tradition, the wives of fishermen along the coast knitted ganseys for their men

Hull fishermen wearing ganseys

folk.  Although the word gansey derives from Guernsey, Yorkshire was definitely the centre of production of ganseys although they were worn in some ither fishing communities like the east coast of Scotland. It is likely that the herring fleets who travelled to Yorkshire ports each year brought the knitting tradition with them, as girls also came down to gut and clean the fish landed. Each Yorkshire village hand its own style (e.g. Staithes, Scarborough, Filey, Flamborough) and each family its own variant on this pattern. If a fisherman drowned, those who found the body would know which village and family he belonged to from the design of his gansey. They were usually navy blue although a Sunday best one would be in a different colour. They were knitted in the round - tight fitting and with a high neck to keep out the elements. The designs reflected marine life, with anchors, ropes, waves, herringbone, flags and other symbols linked to the sea. Whilst walking balls of wool were carried on a clew-hook from the belt. In the Dales, knitters preferered to use a goose-wing knitting stick tucked into a ordinary belt. Designs still exist from places like Filey and Flamborough, where there is still a business selling traditional ganseys and the fishermen on their cobbles still wear traditional ganseys. Examples can be seen in places such as the Filey and Whitby museums. They were won with nothing underneath and just a neckerchief to stop chafing around the neck. Like the Dales knitters, knitters used a knitting stick and belt. Hull Maritime Museum holds a knitting stick carved in the shape of a fish.

Hattersley Loom (Copyright
Clem Rutter, used under creative
commons licence)

Weaving
The whole economy of West Yorkshire came to depend on woollen cloth production by the great mills but originally this was a small-scale domestic activity as it still is in the Western Isles. It is curious to note that the weaving of tweed, which is so associated with the Isle of Harris now, was acrtually introduced by a Yorkshireman on Hattersley looms developed in the county. There is little left of the hand weaving tradition in.Yorkshire now, but you can still see the old weavers houses in places like Holmfirth with long rows of windows in the upper stories. In Leeds you can also see the Cloth Halls where the weavers brought their cloth to sell, along with inns where they each merchant would trade their cloth.