High-ply and hand-framed

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.