High-ply and hand-framed

Paul Vincent

To get ahead in the knitwear game, it probably helps to do things different from the next knitter. Keep it up, do it very well, and you might make a success of it. Stick around — for a century or two, perhaps — and you might even wind up becoming quite well known.
This is what the hand-framed knitwear maker has done: making hand-framed knitwear for four generations by relying on, on the one hand, the likes of the hand-wound Griswold machine, sock-shapers carved from willow, and an armada of hand-operated contraptions — and, on the other, time-consuming tasks like intarsia and hand-linking. It all adds up to an idiosyncratic mix, which has seen the maker tidily through the past century, and will most likely never be replicated — mostly because, if nothing else, nobody is mad enough, persistent enough, or passionate enough, to take the same path. The hand-framed knitwear factory — makers of this and that — can now be found here.

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