Herring Girl Patterns

Traditional knitwear was often made for work, it got dirty and had a hard life. To make sure the meaning of each garment was known; who it was for, who it was from, why it was knitted, the Herring Girls could not rely on just colour. Patterns started to get knitted into the knitwear, sometimes unique to a knitter or wearer, sometimes unique to the village or port, with different regions of Britain having their own patterns and meanings.

When ordering your Hiring Girl Collection Knitwear, you can select which of these patters will be knitted into your products, selecting from some of the more widely used patters. If you would like a Gansey, part of the reason it takes a wee bit of time is that you can get just about any pattern you might want, even if it is truly unique.

Anchor

With a ring on top a cross bar, the shaft of the anchor drops down to the main cross member, just like any anchor you have seen drawn in a picture.

Marriage Lines

Bringing two people together, following a path through life together, this pattern is distinctive for having two parallel lines following each other side by side.

Net

Like any good fishing net, this is a regular pattern repeated across a large area, providing a regular texture on the knitting, as if a net was sitting on top.

Sail

If you look at a little yacht or dingy, it will have a mast going straight up and a beam coming out the side from the bottom. The sail will form a triangle between these two lines, and the sail pattern repeats this triangular motif.

Ships Wheel

As the main way of controlling the direction of a ship, the wheel is often used as the main central pattern on a shawl. A stylised circle of the wheel with spokes running out from the centre and the handles on the outside of the wheel.

Wheat Ear

Look at an ear of wheat (a weetabix logo) and you see the column of V-shaped seeds packed in net to each other. This repeating pattern from nature is knitted into our collection.

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