Meet a Maker: Edition 37

Meet Angharad Thomas

1. What is your craft and how did you get into it?

I’m a knitter who does both hand and machine knitting, which is generally unusual. I find a lot of people only do one or the other since both are quite different crafts. I specialise in glove knitting. It was not until my mid-30s that I transitioned from knitting for myself to a professional level. I took a master’s in knitwear and knitted fabric design at what is now Trent University. I became a knitwear designer working with both hand and machine knitting for about five years. I then moved into university level teaching in textiles and then design more broadly. I completed my PhD before turning 60 on textiles and sustainability through the lens of patterned gloves.

I started making hand knitted patterned gloves about 15 years ago, having discovered them thirty years earlier. There is a tradition of patterned knitted gloves in the UK, as well as in Scandinavia and the Baltic countries. I learned the pattern vocabulary for traditional patterns from Yorkshire and Southern Scotland. In the UK, gloves are generally designed with two colours and set design motifs in areas like the cuff. Once I understood the traditions around these gloves, I started creating my own designs. I generally stick to hand knitting, but I have experimented with machine knitting the gloves too. The big advantage of machine knitting is that it’s quick. I can work through more design ideas like colour, textures, and patterns on the machine to experiment.

2. What is one interesting fact about you?

I always have to explain my name more or less every time I meet somebody and surprisingly it has only become worse the older I get. I believe the confusion is that it’s a Welsh name, but I was born and always lived in England. I was never allowed to shorten it as a child. Over the years when I met Welsh speakers they assumed I spoke Welsh based on my name, which made these encounters even more awkward and annoying. I jokingly attribute the constant name explaining issue to my feisty nature. Since my 40s, I have learned a bit of Welsh, which has made it a bit easier at least with Welsh speakers.

3. How long have you been making?

I started when I was a small girl. I learned how to knit from my mother, which was normal at the time. I am of the generation where children were taught to knit by mothers and grandmothers and it was a skill commonly done as a way of getting nice things cheaper.

4. Who is/are your favourite maker(s) in your craft? Anyone you admire in your craft field?

There are several fabulous Estonian makers in the glove knitting world that I admire. Kristi Jõeste is a master in reproducing gloves that are in the national collection in Estonia. In a Spanish collection there is a pair of knitted gloves that have text in the knitting that I love. I also find inspiration from the historical Yorkshire Dales knitter named Mary Allen who died in 1924. She knitted a lot of gloves that I see in collections that are expertly made.

5. What is the most challenging skill/technique you learned in your craft?

I think it’s the designing part that is the most challenging. There are tricky techniques in knitting, but they need to be executed with a design consideration too. I think a lot of people don’t appreciate the design elements of knitting. You can have challenging technical moments with both machine and hand knitting that one can solve, but the project will never truly work if the fundamental design of the project such as shaping, colour, or proportions are not there.

6. What is your favourite part of your craft? 

I love the designing part of making a pair of gloves. I enjoy sitting down with some balls of wool and coloured pencils and have a good scribble. I have notebooks and notebooks full of patterns and tiny swatches of glove designs. I will have plenty of ideas that once I do a small test, realise the colours look actually horrible together in practice or the sizing of the pattern will not work around the fingers of the glove. The other best feeling is when I finally get to knit my pattern and slowly see the progress as I work my way up through the charted pattern and its successful design. It is a very satisfying process.

7. What project are you most proud of and why?

My book, ‘A Knitter’s Guide to Gloves’ published in 2023! It covers all aspects of glove knitting from how to do it, materials and tools, history, lots of examples from the UK and Europe and 6 patterns for the reader to knit. The book has many illustrations including images of gloves in museums and collections that are rarely seen. It also has some specially commissioned drawings.

8. If someone who knows nothing about you or your practice could know one thing, what would it be?

I want to make a pitch for knitting being both skilled and difficult. There is a lot of discourse around knitting about how relaxing and soothing the craft is. I think this is true for some craft work, and there can be this meditative state when working in any craft. However, it is also true that knitting is a highly developed craft skill that can be incredibly difficult and frustrating. There is still a great deal of hand and machine knitting done for an income and this creates a pressured environment for the maker. Hand knitting in particular is a very slow craft and professional knitters are always under the pressure of time, looking for ways to speed up their process for a better financial return.