In my last post, Alice was off to study sweaters in the Dublin National Museum of Ireland.

In my recent reading she dissected 4 garments beginning with an early piece (donated in 1937) from Aran that had the structure of a Scottish Gansey. Her dissection was complex and through. Actually, I was awed by her knowledge of knitting structure.

From the first garment, she concluded that what began as circular knit garments without seams evolved into Aran Sweaters knit in pieces. This seems to have been done to allow a knitter to work with textured patterns without being a mathematical genius needed to work out some of the shaping points in the sweaters.

One remarkable conclusion made by Alice is that Aran women learned Gansey knitting skills from Scottish sources.

Also, Aran sweaters (often called f) were not made as a fisherman’s garment. Will talk more about this in my next post.

I want to talk more about Alice’s conclusions, but I’m off to visit the UK tonight and have a plane to catch! I’ll be silent post-wise for a couple of weeks. Sadly, I’m not visiting Aran, although it is on my bucket list!