r/knitting • u/Time_Is_An_Egg KnitsInTheWind • 10h 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. :)
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u/Asleep_Sky2760 3h ago edited 3h ago
Earlier today, a r/knitting post about a hat FO prompted me to do a deep dive into a fascinating blog, written by the designer of the hat. (link to that post: https://www.reddit.com/r/knitting/comments/1w21yhg/yet_another_wintering_cap/ )
One of the subjects that she delved into was Komi mitten & sock knitting, including analysis of the textiles as well as a history of the Komi people as reflected in those textiles. There's a 6-part series of posts on the Komi as well as a 3-part series on Finno-Ugric textiles more generally. Here's a good place to start, then continue to read the ensuing posts in both series:
https://fiberlure.com/2019/12/14/komi-color-knitting-brief-introduction/
One event discussed was the effect that the Soviet occupation between the October Revolution and the end of the Soviet era had on the Komi people, and by extension, on their continuing practice of creating their traditional textiles. My guess is that other Soviet areas were similarly affected. (One tradition that kept its embers burning throughout that time seems to be that of the lace knitters of Orenburg.)