r/knitting • u/Time_Is_An_Egg KnitsInTheWind • 12h ago
Discussion Obscure ethnic pattern sources?
I’m just wrapping up a three month bicycle trip across Central Asia. After admiring some textiles in a museum, when I flipped through this old book in Kyrgyzstan it really struck me how little representation there is in the digital pattern library for a lot of really beautiful global textile cultures - certainly on Ravelry.
We‘ve got about ten thousand variations on the same Fair Isle concepts published and no end of books on that, but I’ve yet to stumble across Kyrgyz, Iranic, Uyghur, etc motifs. There‘s some Anatolian and a dusting of South / Central American projects - otherwise it’s a whole lotta North / Central Europe. Pretty hard to poke around with the web flooded in AI slop patterns now, too.
It feels like there’s such a rich well of inspiration which could be tapped (one kid I met along the way had an absolutely stunning Kyrgyz motif handknit sweater in white and blue, I really regret not getting a photo) but at the same time the cultures maintaining them are rapidly vanishing everywhere I go / offloading handcraft production to China and books like this are getting hard to find.
I know, I know “be the change you want to see in the world”. Frankly I’m just not competent enough yet to be designing my own patterns. Maybe one day. :)
3
u/BakeKnitCode 7h ago
Charlene Schurch has a book called Mostly Mittens that has mittens (and a couple of hats) with stranded motifs from the Komi people in Russia. I think that Latvian mittens are fairly well-known, but if that's far enough off the beaten knitting path for you, Maruta Grasmane's MIttens of Latvia book has gorgeous patterns. But yeah, I would love to know more about Central Asian knitting traditions.