It's All in the Details: Getting Hemmed in

Carding room at the Mishawaka Woolen Co, c.1902

Anybody reading this blog (with apologies to all of my octogenarian fans :) has grown up in an age where clothing is largely machine-made. Not just made in factories, but literally machine-made. Occasionally you'll run into details--beaded trim, say--that have clearly been stitched by hand, but those are usually manufactured overseas to take advantage of low-wage labor. Many of us aren't even aware that, until about the 1970's, it was often easier and more economical to make your own clothing than buy it off the rack.  (See? Those seemingly-obsolete Home Ec classes we took in high school once existed for a reason!) Since fabric was woven (i.e. no stretch) rather than knit, knowing how to sew meant that, at the very least, you didn't have to pay for the alterations needed to make your clothes fit.

MLB baseball lacers at Rawlings' factory in Costa Rica, 2017

Nowadays, people associate handmade clothing either with haute couture fashion designers or hobbyists. We forget that, up through the first half of the 20th century, an entire industry existed in this country where people made knitted garments, and many of those garments were made by hand. I'll admit that I haven't had much success tracking down manufacturing details, but as far as I can tell, things like the Ty Cobb Sweater were done entirely "by hand." As in by one person (or group of people), on knitting needles. Some parts may have been done by machine--not an electric machine, but something hand-cranked--but, by and large, these sweaters were handmade. Factory-manufactured, but handmade. (An interesting aside: one thing that is still "factory-manufactured but handmade" is a baseball. To this day, no one has figured out how to lace a baseball by machine, so every baseball used in every game--even in Little League--is hand-laced.)

Hem on the original Ty Cobb Sweater (outside)

So I guess the question is: Why do I think that? What's the giveaway that suggests people, not machines, made Ty Cobb's sweater?

It turns out you can tell right from the beginning--as in, starting at the hem. (For those of you unfamiliar with knitting, sweaters are generally made from the bottom up.)

Hem on the original Ty Cobb Sweater (inside)

Hem on the reproduction (outside)

Hem on the reproduction (inside)

Take a look at the hem on the original HOF sweater. You'll see immediately that it's very different from the ribbed bottom cuffs we associate with knitted sweaters today. This is much more like the hem on a sewn piece of clothing. However, unlike sewn clothing, this hem is not stitched in place using a machine. Instead, it is knit-in. The bottom is folded over, and the stitches from the original edge are literally knit together with a later row. (Note: I apologize for the extremely poor photograph of the inside of the hem on the original. Apparently, I thought the technique was so self-evident that I didn't bother to take a decent picture at the time. Granted, when I took those pics, I also didn't think I'd be writing a blog.)

To my knowledge, knitting stitches together is not something that lends itself to machine-knitting, even hand-cranked machine-knitting. While this is not a technique that's used often in hand-knitting today, it's not unheard of, and I was able to reproduce it without too much trouble.

It's also the first example of a construction detail that appears to have been standard at the time but has since been lost to history. (So far, all of the historical baseball sweaters I've encountered have similar hems.) As we move up the sweater, we'll see more of those. Some make sense, some are counter-intuitive--if not downright head-scratching--and some only seem counter-intuitive until you remember that these were made in a factory, not in somebody's home.

More surprises to come!