The Fisherman Sweater and the Cable That Made It Famous
The Fisherman Sweater and the Cable That Made It Famous
The gansey came first, the cable came later, and the truth is a better story than the legend.
The gansey came first
Before there was an Aran sweater there was the gansey. Fishermen all over the British Isles wore them through the 1800s. Dark navy, knit in the round with no side seams so nothing rubbed while you hauled a net, worked tight and dense so the wind could not get in.
It is a beautiful piece of engineering and almost nobody talks about it. Everything that came after is standing on it.
A younger tradition than people think
The cream colored, cable covered sweater we all picture came out of the Aran Islands in the 1890s and the early 1900s. The oldest surviving examples date to the early twentieth century. Knitting on the islands was encouraged as a cottage trade, and skills came in from knitters elsewhere in Ireland and Britain and got mixed with what was already there.
The wool was báinín, undyed and cream, spun with the lanolin still in it so it shed water. A single sweater was many hours of work.
You have probably heard the story that every family had its own stitch, so a drowned man could be named by his sweater. It is a wonderful story. It appears to come from a stage play, John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea, first published in 1903, in which a woman recognizes her brother by stitches in a knitted stocking. A play turned into a legend, and the legend sold sweaters around the world. That is its own kind of magic.
What a cable actually does
A cable is made by crossing stitches over each other as you knit. The fabric doubles back on itself where the crossing happens, which makes the sweater thicker in those places and traps more air. Air is what keeps you warm.
So the cable is not decoration that got lucky. It is a structure that happens to be gorgeous. That is the kind of thing I look for in everything we make.
Ours
Our cable knit fisherman sweater is knit in the finest mill in northern Japan. It is one hundred percent merino, Rocky Mountain merino wool, in a deep navy. It is worsted spun at a five gauge, which is what gives it that bulk and that softness at the same time.
The cable design is our own, drawn for this sweater and nothing else. There is a Black Bear Brand heritage green label at the back neck. I wear a medium in it.
A Way Of Life.
Shop the Story
Black Bear Brand Cable Knit Fisherman Wool Sweater
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