the.com/spool knitting
Childhood's gateway drug to fiber arts, run on a cork and four nails.
means A simple knitting technique that uses a small spool or tube fitted with pegs to produce a long knitted cord or tube, often as a child's first craft.
from The 'spool' is the old word for the cylinder you wind thread on, from Middle English and ultimately a Germanic root for a chip or peg of wood. The craft itself goes by many homely names — 'corking,' 'French knitting,' 'tomboy knitting' — and the classic homemade rig was exactly what the essence describes: an empty wooden cotton-reel with four nails or pins driven into one end, the yarn looped over them and lifted with a hook. As factory thread came on spools and households had them to spare, the humble reel found a second life as a toy, and the name stuck.
- also called
- French knitting, corking, or knitting Nancy
- output
- endless cord nobody asked for
- original tool
- thread spool with hammered-in nails
- the trick
- loop over, lift under, repeat forever
- industrial cousin
- scaled-up machines knit modern cording
french knitting — traditional craft using a wooden spool with nails, producing cord since the 1800s
knitting nancy — commercial version of spool knitter sold in craft stores since the 1960s