Craft skills education and its importance to the knitwear industry – a Scottish experience

Dr Lisa Macintyre, School of Textiles and Design, Heriot-Watt University, Scotland, UK

Harris Tweed Image from www.craftscotland.org and argyle jumper from www.brora.co.uk

Tartans, tweed, fairisle and argyle knitwear, Shetland lace, paisley pattern and the finest cashmere have long been associated with Scotland. Historically, Scotland and the Scottish Borders were major processors of woollen textiles for export all over the world and we still have vibrant niche textile industries particularly in the luxury sector. Textiles and fashion remain major sectors of Scotland’s creative Industries, employing thousands in design and highly skilled production. The School of Textiles and Design, situated in Galashiels, has a long history of delivering training and education tailored to the needs of the Textiles Industry. Originally established as The Scottish Woollen Technical College in 1883 by local manufacturers, graduates worked in the local industries, over the years the School has broadened its offering to prepare graduates for both local and global Industries. Many graduates work for and lead major fashion and textile brands while others start their own small businesses offering bespoke or luxury products to local and international customers. Our degree programmes educate our students in: design; practical craft skills; textile and fashion technology; trend, Industry and market understanding; critical analysis and reflection. Many UK institutions are reducing the practical skills training, facilities and practical work in their programmes for a number of reasons including cost cutting. The School of textiles and design remains committed to delivering practical programmes and boasts the best textile and fashion production facilities in a UK University. This paper will explore why we believe that craft skills are so critical to producing the best graduates and supporting our textile Industry.

1. Importance of craft skills

1.1 What happens when you have creativity without craft skills?

With good design training students can produce beautiful, contemporary and trend-relevant commercial designs. However, without craft skills and knowledge such as a hands-on understanding

of raw materials (fibre and yarn), structure, fabric properties, the importance of tension, garment construction techniques, etc. they cannot design the most innovative products nor can they design and produce or accurately specify garments that will replicate the design vision. This has different implications for new graduates depending on whether they set up their own business or seek employment in industry:

a) Personal/professional implications to own business – many graduates intend to set up small businesses designing and making bespoke or one-off products. In order to cover the high production times and associated costs with this type of production, products are normally necessarily targeted at the high end of the market. With a high product price comes high expectations from the customer in terms of design, fit, comfort, durability and high quality finish. Without a high level of craft skills graduates would be unable to make products that either realise their design ambitions or satisfy customer’s expectations of the product.

b) Industrial implications – many graduates will find employment in Industry as designers, product developers, buyers, etc.. All of these roles are likely to involve communicating designs and products to manufacturers, whether ‘in-house’ or sub-contracted, if the graduate doesn’t have an in-depth understanding of their product and how it is put together then they will be unable to specify it accurately enough to get the product they want. This will result in long sampling processes, costing time and money. They may be unable to recognise the quality issues in first samples and not know how to resolve these. It may also be the case that a lack of understanding will result in inappropriate choices and products that do not meet appropriate quality standards or production targets/price.

1.2 What happens when you have craft skills without design and market understanding?

Craft skills without strong design skills blended with a good understanding of your customer expectations and taste will result in well-made products that people do not want to buy. Products may be perceived as ugly, un-fashionable, made in poor taste or they may simply not be desirable or unique enough to warrant a high cost of production. In the worst cases products may suffer from all of these conditions.

High levels of craft skills can be applied to copying products, but copies are rarely worth the same as originals. They may also be utilised to produce the designs of others, but craft skills alone are not normally as highly valued as design/maker skills, resulting in lower pay compared to if you were working on your own designs. Therefore, we do not teach craft skills in isolation. Our local luxury knitwear Industry trains its employees in specific production skills and craftsmanship using apprenticeships that last between 6 months and 4 years depending on the particular skills the employee needs to learn. The employee’s skills will be honed and developed over their career and as they become more expert they will do increasingly skilled work in the mills.

1.3 What happens when you combine craft skills with design and market understanding?

A strong blend of design and craft skills with understanding of current fashion trends and market/customer needs enables designers to design, communicate and cost their products effectively. A deep understanding of the myriad raw materials, knit structures, finishes and garment construction techniques available enables the designer to design the most innovative new structures and garments whilst understanding the cost and production implications of their design. Pair this with an understanding of what the market desires and the price they will be willing to pay for it and designers or designer/makers are able to make sound commercial choices about the styles they choose to make and those that they don’t. This will be more rewarding both fiscally and emotionally! At its best this combination of skills and understanding can lead to a situation where everything that is made is bought and in some, rare, cases products can be so desirable that they have a waiting list.

Images of fully-fashioned knitwear production from www.hawickknitwear.com

2. Scottish luxury knitwear industry – an industry based on craft skills

Craft Scotland lists cashmere production and Fair Isle knitting as 2 of Scotland’s 10 traditional crafts (in fact 6 of the 10 traditional Scottish crafts listed are textiles) and each of the luxury (cashmere) knitwear manufacturers push the importance of ‘craftsmanship’ to their products. Manufacturers are so proud of the high levels of craftsmanship in their products that many have made films of their processes and offer mill tours to customers and tourists.

In the simplest case an item of knitwear would pass through a minimum of the following stages in production, many of which require significant levels of manual skill and experience:

1. Machine set-up and rib knitting2. Rib loading3. Panel knitting (x4)4. Panel inspection (x4)5. Trim knitting6. Trim inspection7. Sorting/bundling8. Point to point shoulder linking9. Sleeve linking

10. Cup seaming – side seams11. Bar tacking12. First finish – wash13. First finish – dry14. First finish – steam15. Neck marking16. Neck cutting17. Neck linking18. Hand finish/sew neck trim

19. Steam/size20. Inspection21. Lint removal

22. labelling23. Packaging

In the case of cardigans or any garment with pockets, several additional highly skilled stages would be added to production. The following description of ‘linking’ should help to illustrate the level of skill involved: the first stage in joining panels of knitwear to make garments involves ‘linking’ front panels to back panels at the shoulders. This is done using a ‘linking machine’, which has a dial with ‘points’ sticking out, each loop from a particular row of knitting on the front panel must be placed onto its own point (loops cannot be dropped and must be placed on consecutive points). The process is repeated for the back panel, but loops are placed onto points that already contain the corresponding loops from the front panel. This way, each loop from the front panel is matched with a loop from the back panel on a metal point. Depending on the gauge of knitwear being linked there may be up to 20 loops per inch. Once the loops are safely on the points and are matched up, the linking machine knits the 2 sets of loops together. The ‘linker’ then removes the knitting from the linking machine and unravels the excess knitting (above the linked loops) to reveal a perfectly joined shoulder with no excess fabric. If the linking is not perfect then the pieces need to be unravelled and knitted again as any dropped stitch will result in a ‘ladder’ and imperfect garment. Linking takes years to perfect and an apprentice linker is unlikely to produce items that can be sold (even when linked very slowly) for at least the first few months of their employment.

The Scottish Borders has a long history of textile and knitwear production. Knitting fames were first introduced to Scotland in 1681 and by the 1770s they had spread all over the country. Originally knitting frames were hand powered and used for the production of stockings that were flat knitted to the required shape and size, known as ‘fully-fashioned’. The shaped flat pieces of knitting were then hand sewn into stockings and this resulted in a seam up the back of the leg. In 1839 Hawick, a small town in the Scottish Borders, made more than 1 million pairs of woollen and silk stockings and by 1844 of the 2605 stocking frames in Scotland half were in Hawick and its surrounding villages. During the 1800s the demand for stockings decreased and the Hawick knitting industry diversified into the production of fully-fashioned underwear. While the companies of Hawick diversified into different products using the skills they had built up over generations of knitting, other regions diversified into cheaper methods of production. This cemented the collective reputation of the town’s manufacturers for producing high quality fully-fashioned goods, which became known as “Hawick goods” by English and some international buyers.

Around 1900 the Hawick companies began knitting fully-fashioned outerwear, ‘knitwear’ such as jumpers and cardigans. This was very innovative and was seen as risky business that was likely to be only a brief trend. However, during World War 1 the town produced jumpers for the army (which until this point were very rare) and ribbed pants for the navy. This led to high demand for woollen jumpers after 1918. In the 1920s ‘jumper suits’ (knitted jumper with knitted or woven skirt) and knitted ‘sportswear’ were popularised by Chanel, Patou and Schapierelli. Chanel, in particular, used knitted fabrics and garments so extensively in her collections and personal styling that the market for knitted outerwear grew significantly. The Hawick knitwear companies soon realised that in order to be successful in outerwear they were going to have to keep up to date with fashion trends and several invested in designers. Pringle of Scotland (originally established in 1815 as stocking makers) began making knitwear later than many of their Hawick counterparts but with their lead designer

Otto Weisz they pioneered the twin set and ‘dress-maker’ style knitwear (with collars, buttons, etc) in the 1930s and remained an important fashion knitwear brand throughout the century.

Until the 1930s Hawick companies knitted in fine woollen and worsted wools or silk. From the 1930s the demand for ‘fancy’ knitwear increased and companies increasingly used rarer animal fibres and cashmere in particular. The town had always specialised in the high end of the market and maintained a hugely skilled workforce. It has been argued that the move to ever finer and more exclusive yarns married with the high level of local skills, placed products firmly in the luxury sector and this helped to protect the Industry from the worst effects of the 1930s depression and subsequent World War 2. As early as 1925 Australian buyers described ‘Hawick goods’ as “too aristocratic” for their market, but sales in the USA and Europe were strong.

Today the knitwear industry in Hawick remains vibrant with more than 20 knitwear companies, ranging from micro single-craftsperson enterprises to businesses with over 300 employees, producing 7000 items of knitwear per week. They all supply excellent quality fully-fashioned or seamless knitwear to a global market. Many products are branded with the makers name but a significant proportion of their business is making products for luxury brands around the world, including: Prada, Hermes, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, etc.. The success of the Hawick knitwear Industry, during a period of significant hardship for the UK textile industry can be attributed to a number of factors:

1. Skills: very early in their history the town’s companies specialised in, and built their reputation upon, skills/technique rather than product. It recognised the importance of craftsmanship, trained its staff well and invested in their skills even when this seemed economically counter-productive.

2. Raw materials: They had access to the world’s finest woollen and cashmere yarns from an early stage and thereby married exceptional skills and production techniques with the finest quality raw materials to make some of the best quality knitwear in the world.

3. Design: As companies moved into the outerwear market, they recognised the need to understand fashion trends and design desirable products. Companies unable to design/ produce attractive, on-trend products went out of business and the companies that remain all have strong in-house design departments and/or product development teams (if they only manufacture to the designs of external brands).

4. Location: Scottish water, including that from the river Teviot flowing through Hawick, is exceptionally soft and this enables skilled finishers to deliver an exceptionally soft ‘handle’ in the knitted products. (The water quality is also very important in the spinning process and most factories continue to predominantly use yarns spun in Scotland, although English and Italian yarns are also now used.)

5. Association: The companies of Hawick saw the benefits of working together from an early stage, forming first The Hawick Framework Knitters’ Society and in the 20th century the Hawick Hosiery Manufacturer’s Association. These associations helped to build the strength and reputation of ‘Hawick goods’ with buyers, organise training courses for employees and in 1910 made a formal agreement not to poach each other’s skilled staff (which was economically very beneficial to the new employer and detrimental to the old one who had invested in training them).

6. Market: The knitwear companies that survive in Hawick have all successfully shifted their business from declining markets to emerging ones with sufficient overlap that risks were minimised and opportunities maximised and without losing sight of what their unique competencies were. This often required certain leaps of faith that were no doubt made easier by the high concentration of other businesses with similar experiences.

7. Education: the industry recognised the need for training and educating its staff. Technical education had been provided in Hawick for many years but by the 1930s the importance of design skills, particularly garment design had been recognised and measures were put in place to resolve this. Although training and educating staff was expensive there was acceptance that giving practical instruction in skills and design had improved the factories. Education in a combination of design and practical skills has been recognised as being of key importance, by the Industry, since the 1920s.

8. Entrepreneurial culture: Scotland has been described as a ‘Nation of Inventors’ and is known for inculcating a ‘have a go’ attitude in its people. This culture of entrepreneurship helped give our local cashmere/ knitwear industries advantages in terms of access to technologies, confidence to establish a company in the first instance and confidence to diversify and try new products when old markets are looking less profitable.

3. Skills education

3.1 Recruitment

There is a strong tradition of teaching ‘art’ in Scottish (and UK) schools and many students who favour art over languages, maths, science and social science will seek opportunities to work in the arts and wider creative industries as adults. High school art typically includes fine art and many crafts including sculpture, pottery, print making, etc.. Many high schools also offer qualifications in ‘creative fashion’ and a few offer ‘textiles’. One of the popular routes in the UK for applying art/craft skills to a higher education level and then on to a career is to study Fashion or Textiles to degree/honours degree level. The School has a long history and strong reputation for teaching textiles and fashion and therefore has no shortage of students.

3.2 Skills training at the School of Textiles and Design, Heriot-Watt University

In the School of Textiles and Design we embed craft skills into several of our educational programmes, specifically:

In ‘Fashion’ and especially in ‘Fashion Technology’ we teach a variety of craft skills, including: pattern cutting; draping; machine sewing; garment construction; finishing and embellishment.

In ‘Design for Textiles’ we teach craft skills in: knitting; weaving; printing (both hand silk-screen and digital); garment making; dyeing and finishing.

Our students are normally very keen to learn craft skills as they are seen as valuable, important and practical. Students and graduates believe that knowing how to make things will enhance their

understanding and give them a competitive edge in the job market. Many students report that they chose to come to our School because we have so much more equipment and technical expertise than our competitors.

3.3 Knitwear craft skills

In this paper I am going to focus on the ‘knitting’ skills we teach. Our school focuses on the design and prototype production of ‘knitwear’, which is defined as outerwear garments with an integral rib (i.e. there is no hem or visible seam at the edges of the garment). We teach hand-operated machine knitting on both domestic knitting machines and Industrial v-bed machines. These machines are entirely manual in their set up and fabric production and require significant skill to operate, particularly for experimentation, sampling and prototyping. Although we use machines to knit, students require a special aptitude/skill and a ‘relationship’ with the machines, some people have a natural affinity for machine knitting and with a little training and practice they can learn basic skills and produce simple fabrics. However, even these fortunate few will have to experiment for years to become expert in creating good quality innovative knitting on these machines. For most, the process of knitting is far from natural and requires dedication to learn and become comfortable with the machines while for others machine knitting is always arduous and difficult and produces little of either beauty or quality. These students will normally choose to major in either weaving or printing!

The specific knitting skills that we teach include:

1. Yarn selection for particular products, machine gauge and fabric structure. Students must understand the implications of using different fibre types/blends, yarn types and yarn counts on their products physical performance, aesthetics and cost.

2. Setting appropriate input, stitch and take-down tensions on the machine for the yarn, fabric structure and machine used in order to achieve good quality knitting, the ideal ‘cover’ and correct size of finished piece.

3. The range of standard knit structures that can be produced on these machines and how to achieve them using different needle arrangements and cam settings. Once they have learned standard structures they are able to combine these and improvise to design and sample innovative pieces. Practically, making the fabrics themselves also gives a deep understanding of production difficulties and costs associated with different structures.

4. How to knit trims, including special edges, collars, straps, etc. for garments. Trims can be critical to garment success and often an interesting trim can lift an otherwise simple garment from ordinary to desirable. In addition to their aesthetic the trim must also have the correct physical properties for the design.

5. Stitch transfer for the shaping of garment panels and patterning. Stitch transfer involves moving stitches that have already been knitted onto different needles, it is a difficult and critical manual skill enabling garment panels to be shaped on the machine and a wide range of patterns (including cables, lace and ‘Aran’ styles).

6. Quality measurements from samples for production planning. Learning how to make first samples and then take quality measurements from samples enables students to maintain product quality and do production calculations.

7. How to calculate the knitting instructions for garments of different styles and sizes. This enables the students to create shaped garments from their design and samples, this skill can be used to write industrial knitting instructions for local or overseas production units.

8. Linking - how to join fabric panels to make neat/durable garments using linking machines, machine linking is much harder to learn than hand-sewing but is quicker once skilled. This enables our students to make garments or ‘garment front’ samples that effectively communicate design ideas.

9. How to finish different fabric types to achieve different aesthetic or haptic qualities in the product. Finishing processes are critical to achieving a product that consumers will find desirable. Fabrics, particularly those made from animal fibres, look, feel and behave completely differently before and after finishing. Basic finishing involves washing, drying and steaming fabrics and although this sounds simple it is not and requires years of experience to become expert at.

10. How to sample fabric swatches and garments, assess samples and amend samples according to the design/customer needs. In Higher Education it is critical that our students not only learn practical craft skills but also have the ability to be critical about what they do and make. They learn craft skills in order to truly understand process and, in combination with the other subjects studied, this equips them to discriminate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ designs and understand how to refine and improve products.

11. We also teach an introduction to knitwear machine programming (for Shima Seiki electronic v-beds) and students have limited access to production on these machines. However, the bulk of the training and student experience is on hand machines. While most of our graduates will work with this type of Industrial machine during their careers, if we trained them only on electronic machines their understanding of process and ‘feeling’ for knitwear production would be limited and distant. Our experience shows that students who are really expert on hand-operated machines have a much deeper understanding of product than those who do not. Many of our most successful graduates will continue design sampling on hand-operated machines even when working for companies whose entire production is automated.

As previously mentioned we also teach design skills, context, underlying technology, management, marketing, visual studies, etc. to enable students to design fabrics/garments/products that are desirable, economically viable and likely to be commercially successful.

3. 4 Resources

Clearly teaching craft skills at this level requires considerable investment in resources and in our case these resources include:

1. Space: a large hand machine workshop, large open-access yarn store, small lockable luxury yarn store, small machine maintenance workshop, powered machine workshop and computer aided design room.

2. Specific knitwear equipment: 32 Industrial hand-operated V-bed knitting machines ranging from coarse (E2.5) to fine (E16) gauge (most are either E5 or E7 as these are the easiest to learn on);

30 single needle bed domestic knitting machines; 3 domestic v-beds; 6 domestic and 3 industrial linking machines; 2 domestic yarn winders; industrial iron with vacuum ironing board.

3. Staffing: 1 full-time and 1 part-time knitwear design lecturer; 1 part-time textile/knitwear technology lecturer; 1 full-time and 1 part-time knitwear technician.

In addition to the specific, dedicated knitwear resources we also provide a wide range of support resources, including access to our: fully-equipped and staffed sewing workshops; finishing (washing, drying and steaming) facilities; yarn/fabric dyeing and printing facilities, etc. and associated staff.

3.5 Challenges and lessons learned

Teaching craft skills as part of a British Higher Education degree can be difficult and is very expensive. We face a number of challenges, ranging from very practical issues to broader philosophical questions, including:

1. Resources - machines: we have a large number of knitting machines and associated equipment that needs to be maintained. Students break needles and jam machines on a daily basis. Therefore, we need to keep stock of replacement parts for our knitting machines and we need to employ a technician to keep the machines in good working order. They also require a more major annual maintenance to ensure that they keep running for the next year. This is very expensive and this cost is subsidised by other activities in the School.

2. Resources – yarns: the students need yarns to knit/experiment with. Therefore, we hold a significant stock of yarn and supply this to the students free of charge. This stock has to be maintained and stored in such a way that it is easy for the students to access and understand what we have. This is expensive, both in terms of keeping stock and also in keeping the yarn store tidy. We are fortunate enough to receive a lot of donated yarn from Industry, we also source and dye yarn to standard colours and maintain a luxury yarn store that the students can buy small quantities of expensive yarn from if they wish. Students are required to return their yarns to the yarn store after classes but some are better at this than others and both the knit workshop and yarn store need regular tidying by staff.

3. Teaching and skills training: as with all educational institutions we need to employ staff to instruct and teach. While many of our classes are traditional ‘lectures’ and ‘tutorials’, craft skills and tacit knowledge need to be taught by demonstration and practice. Some very skilled crafts people make excellent teachers, managing to break tasks down into simple stages for the novice and demonstrate slowly what the student should do. Others are so skilled that they have forgotten what it was like not to be expert at their skill and they find it hard to teach students. Our instructors need to have enough skill to demonstrate convincingly and to be able to trouble shoot when things go wrong, but it is worth bearing in mind that sometimes the best teachers are not the best craftspeople. Once students’ have learned basic skills and tacit understanding they can develop their skills further by independent experimentation, seeking inspiration from books, practitioners, staff or other students, but many will still prefer demonstrations!

4. Managing student expectations: we have the best facilities for teaching textile and fashion design in the whole of the UK (including Scotland). We have more machines, more workshops and more technical support than any other UK institution. However, our students often want more than we give them, more practical work, more skills training and more access to facilities.

This is partly because most of our students are very practical people and would rather ‘do’ than ‘reflect’ and partly because motivated students want to try everything. We have to regularly remind students why we are doing a particular activity and what the ‘learning outcomes’ are. Whilst we encourage our students to experiment and learn new craft skills these need to be applied to their design process and reflected on before moving on to learn something else.

5. Where to stop: as with anything in life there is more to know than can possibly be taught in a 4 year degree program. As staff we constantly have to reflect on what we teach and why we are teaching it. We have to be selective about the craft skills that we teach and ensure that these skills will generate the opportunity/experience/understanding that we intend them to. It is also the case that in order to become expert at any one of the skills that we teach the student would need to dedicate 4 years of full-time effort to it. However, we are not training specific crafts people (e.g. linkers, knitters) but textile designers and sometimes we need to remind our students that craft skills without understanding markets, trends, context and technology will not prepare them for degree level employment as designers, innovators, managers, etc…

4. Graduate achievement

Our graduates are very successful and we believe this is, in large part, due to the combination of design and craft skills, analytical abilities, technical and market understanding that they possess. Graduate employment from our programmes is very high and as previously stated our graduates go on to work in:

Local Industry: We have close relationships with local textile companies and many employ our graduates, often phoning up looking for a new graduate if they have a vacancy. At the moment the designers at the larger Hawick knitwear firms, including Johnston’s of Elgin, Barrie (now owned by Chanel) and Peter Scott are all graduates of the School.

Global Industry: Most of our graduates go on to work for established textile or fashion companies in the UK or overseas. For example, Barrie MacPherson graduated in 1994 and worked for: 4 years freelance for the likes of Kenzo, Nicole Farhi and Clements Ribiero; 3 years as Head of Knitwear at Marchpole Group (that includes YSL and Jasper Conran); 1 year as menswear designer at Reiss; 5 years as Head of Menswear Design at Jasper Conran; and currently and for the last 7 years as Design Director at Jasper Conran. Many other graduates have been similarly successful, working for and leading design departments in major global brands including Gap Inc./Banana Republic, Vince, Nike Europe, etc..

Artisanal small businesses: Rosemary Eribé graduated from The Scottish College of Textiles (now known as the School of Textiles and Design) in 1986 and started her own brand of hand and machine knitted Scottish knitwear. Her business, ‘Eribé’, began on a very small, craft scale but the business has steadily grown now exporting to Japan, Italy, Russia, etc. and currently employs 3 of our more recent graduates as

designers and product developers. Her designs are all made in Scotland and most are hand-knitted in the knitter’s home (she has a network of hand-knitters who produce her designs) and where necessary to the design they are machine knitted in a local factory. Eribé has been working with Scottish Enterprise since 2009 to grow her business, which focusses on innovative, design-led, product focussed knitwear. She has won the following awards: 2011 Best Exporter Winner Award: Scottish Borders Excellence Award; 2009 Best Small Business Winner Award: UK Fashion Export and 2008 Ethical Fashion Winner Award: UK Fashion Export.

Many other graduates go on to begin successful small businesses or work as design consultants, some diversify into other products applying their design skills and craft intuition to another textile discipline.