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Emma, wife of the Governor of the Bohuslan region of Sweden, founded the cooperative to aid rural women whose families were suffering during the depression. Emma and a group of women from the Social Democrat Women’s Club began by working on various sewing and craft projects, and eventually settled on knitting. After a few successful seasons creating sturdy work gloves and socks, they realized they could command a higher price for their wares if they were embellished. The earliest embellished designs were simple embroidered knits designed by Vera Bjurström. Once the women of Bohus Stickning realized the popularity of their embroidered knits, they began expanding their repertoire. Using her fine-arts background, Emma began painstakingly sketching and swatching simple stranded colorwork designs. The first designs Emma developed were simple, well-executed stranded colorwork with modern design sense and appeal. French paintings, Victorian decorative arts, Peruvian weavings, and Chinese embroideries all influenced the Bohus Stickning designs. As more designers joined the cooperative, the more inventive the designs became, until they ultimately landed upon the quintessential Bohus Sticking trademark: the purl colorwork stitches.
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• After purling a stitch, make sure to carry the yarn to the back of the work before knitting the next stitch.
• When utilizing more than 2 colors per round, it is still imperative to assign “placement” of the yarns as they are carried across the back of the work. Instead of just a yarn carried across the back of the work (floats) being on the “top” and “bottom”, you will also have a yarn in the middle. Make sure you maintain the placement of these yarns throughout the round. This will make more sense in the doing if it doesn’t make a lot of sense right now. One way to be sure you are maintaining the proper placement of the strands is to check that your balls of yarn are not tangling. If they tangle, you are switching up your placement, which will negatively affect your tension.
• As in Fair Isle, carry the yarns that you are not using up the side of the work – there is no need to cut and weave in additional ends. You can always “tack” a longer float up the side if need be. Only cut a color off if it will not be used for more than 1-2 vertical inch(es) of knitting.
Two great resources to look into if you would like more information on Bohus Knitting are the book Poems of Color by Wendy Keele, and the website Angora Garnet, which has kits and a bounty of gorgeous images from the Bohus collection.
Save for the image of Emma Jacobsson, which is from Poems of Color by Wendy Keele courtesy of Ingrid Mesterton, all images in the post are from the digital archives of the Bohusläns Museum.