The Aran sweater is a style of jumper/sweater

Sweater

A sweater, jumper, pullover, sweatshirt, jersey or guernsey is a garment intended to cover the torso and arms. It is often worn over a shirt, blouse, T-shirt, or other top, but may also be worn alone as a top...

 that takes its name from the Aran Islands

Aran Islands

The Aran Islands or The Arans are a group of three islands located at the mouth of Galway Bay, on the west coast of Ireland. They constitute the barony of Aran in County Galway, Ireland...

 off the west coast of Ireland

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

. It is sometimes known as a fisherman sweater. A classical fisherman's sweater is a bulky garment with prominent cable patterns on the chest, often cream-colored.

The sweaters are distinguished by their use of complex textured stitch patterns, several of which are combined in the creation of a single garment. The word choice of "jumper" or "sweater" (or indeed other options such as "pullover

Pullover

Pullover may refer to:* Pullover Productions, UK producer of the children's television programme Pullover in the early 1980s* Sweater or hoodie, a piece of clothing "pulled over" the head instead of buttoned or zipped-up...

" and "jersey

Jersey (clothing)

A jersey is an item of knitted clothing, traditionally in wool or cotton, with sleeves, worn as a pullover, as it does not open at the front, unlike a cardigan. It is usually close-fitting and machine knitted in contrast to a guernsey that is more often hand knit with a thicker yarn...

") is largely determined by the regional version of English being spoken. In the case of Ireland and Britain, "jumper" is the standard word with "sweater" mainly found in tourist shops. The word used in Irish

Irish language

Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...

 is geansaí, a gaelicization of guernsey

Guernsey (clothing)

A guernsey, or gansey, is a seaman's knitted woollen sweater, similar to a jersey, which originated in the Channel Island of the same name.-Origins:...

which has been re-Anglicised to gansey in Hiberno-English

Hiberno-English

Hiberno-English is the dialect of English written and spoken in Ireland .English was first brought to Ireland during the Norman invasion of the late 12th century. Initially it was mainly spoken in an area known as the Pale around Dublin, with Irish spoken throughout the rest of the country...

.

Originally the sweaters were knitted

Knitting

Knitting is a method by which thread or yarn may be turned into cloth or other fine crafts. Knitted fabric consists of consecutive rows of loops, called stitches. As each row progresses, a new loop is pulled through an existing loop. The active stitches are held on a needle until another loop can...

 using unscoured wool

Wool

Wool is the textile fiber obtained from sheep and certain other animals, including cashmere from goats, mohair from goats, qiviut from muskoxen, vicuña, alpaca, camel from animals in the camel family, and angora from rabbits....

 that retained its natural oils (lanolin

Lanolin

Lanolin , also called Adeps Lanae, wool wax or wool grease, is a yellow waxy substance secreted by the sebaceous glands of wool-bearing animals. Most lanolin used by humans comes from domestic sheep...

) which made the garments water-resistant and meant they remained wearable even when wet. It was primarily the wives of island fishermen who knitted the sweaters.

Some stitch patterns have a traditional interpretation, often of religious significance. The honeycomb

Honeycomb

A honeycomb is a mass of hexagonal waxcells built by honey bees in their nests to contain their larvae and stores of honey and pollen.Beekeepers may remove the entire honeycomb to harvest honey...

 is a symbol of the hard-working bee

Bee

Bees are flying insects closely related to wasps and ants, and are known for their role in pollination and for producing honey and beeswax. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfamily Apoidea, presently classified by the unranked taxon name Anthophila...

. The cable, an integral part of the fisherman's daily life, is said to be a wish for safety and good luck when fishing. The diamond

Rhombus

In Euclidean geometry, a rhombus or rhomb is a convex quadrilateral whose four sides all have the same length. The rhombus is often called a diamond, after the diamonds suit in playing cards, or a lozenge, though the latter sometimes refers specifically to a rhombus with a 45° angle.Every...

 is a wish of success, wealth and treasure. The basket stitch represents the fisherman's basket, a hope for a plentiful catch.

Characteristics

Traditionally, an Aran sweater is made from undyed cream-coloured báinín , a yarn made from sheep's wool, sometimes "black-sheep" wool. They were originally made with unwashed wool that still contained natural sheep lanolin, making it to an extent water-repellent. Up to the 1970s, the island women spun their own yarn

Yarn

Yarn is a long continuous length of interlocked fibres, suitable for use in the production of textiles, sewing, crocheting, knitting, weaving, embroidery and ropemaking. Thread is a type of yarn intended for sewing by hand or machine. Modern manufactured sewing threads may be finished with wax or...

 on spinning wheel

Spinning wheel

A spinning wheel is a device for spinning thread or yarn from natural or synthetic fibers. Spinning wheels appeared in Asia, probably in the 11th century, and very gradually replaced hand spinning with spindle and distaff...

s.

The sweater usually features 4–6 texture patterns each of which is about 5–10 cm (2–4 in) in width, that move down the sweater in columns from top to bottom. Usually, the patterns are symmetrical to a center axis extending down the center of the front and back panel. The patterns also usually extend down the sleeves as well. The same textured knitting is also used to make socks, hats, vests and even skirts.

History

There is debate about when island residents first started making the jumpers. Undoubtedly, residents of the islands produced a local version of a Gansey

Guernsey (clothing)

A guernsey, or gansey, is a seaman's knitted woollen sweater, similar to a jersey, which originated in the Channel Island of the same name.-Origins:...

 sweater similar to other areas of the British Isles for several centuries. Traditional Ganseys from neighbouring regions have much of the same cabling and pattern-work seen in Aran sweaters; however these Ganseys use different construction methods and are knit from a finer wool. Some have suggested that the sweater is an ancient design that has been used on the islands for hundreds of years. Proponents of this theory often point to a picture in the Book of Kells

Book of Kells

The Book of Kells is an illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin, containing the four Gospels of the New Testament together with various prefatory texts and tables. It was created by Celtic monks ca. 800 or slightly earlier...

 that appears to depict an ancient "Aran jumper". Also, many megalith

Megalith

A megalith is a large stone that has been used to construct a structure or monument, either alone or together with other stones. Megalithic describes structures made of such large stones, utilizing an interlocking system without the use of mortar or cement.The word 'megalith' comes from the Ancient...

s around Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

 depict similar patterns to those used in the knitting, which are carved into the stone, and date back several thousand years. However, it is more likely that the knitting stitches were modelled on these than that they evolved contemporaneously.

Most historians agree that far from being an ancient craft, Aran knitting was invented as recently as the early 1900s by a small group of enterprising island women, with the intention of creating garments not just for their families to wear but which could be sold as a source of income. These women adapted the traditional Gansey jumper by knitting with thicker wool and modifying the construction to decrease labor and increase productivity.

The first commercially available Aran knitting patterns were published in the 1940s by Patons of England. Vogue

Vogue (magazine)

Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that is published monthly in 18 national and one regional edition by Condé Nast.-History:In 1892 Arthur Turnure founded Vogue as a weekly publication in the United States. When he died in 1909, Condé Montrose Nast picked up the magazine and slowly began...

 magazine carried articles on the garment in the 1950s, and jumper exports from the west of Ireland to the United States began in the early 1950s.

The development of the export trade during the 1950s and 1960s took place after P.A. Ó Síocháin organized an instructor, with the help of a grant from the Congested Districts Board for Ireland

Congested Districts Board for Ireland

The Congested Districts Board for Ireland was established by the Chief Secretary, Arthur Balfour in 1891 to alleviate poverty and "congested" living conditions in the west of Ireland....

, to go to the islands and teach the knitters how to make garments to standard international sizings. He commissioned the Irish artist Seán Keating

Seán Keating

Seán Keating was an Irish romantic-realist painter who painted some iconic images of the Irish War of Independence and of the early industrialization of Ireland...

, who had spent much time on the islands, to design and illustrate marketing brochures. Knitting became an important part of the islands’ economy, and during the 1960s, even with all available knitters recruited from the three islands and from other parts of Ireland, he had difficulty in fulfilling orders from around the world.

Myths

Aran sweaters are often sold as a "fisherman sweater", suggesting that the sweater was traditionally used by the islands' famous fishermen. There is also some doubt about whether Aran sweaters were ever widely used by fishermen and many argue that the original sweaters with their untreated yarn would not have been suitable for this use. They are quite thick and stiff, which would probably restrict the movements of a fisherman. However, the traditional Gansey jumpers which served as the model for the Aran sweaters have been worn by seamen and fishermen throughout the British Isles for centuries. Islanders can be seen wearing them in photographs taken early in the 20th century.

It is sometimes said that each fisherman (or his family) had a sweater with a unique design, so that if he drowned and was found, maybe weeks later, on the beach, his body could be identified. This misconception may have originated with J.M. Synge's 1904 play Riders to the Sea, in which the body of a dead fisherman is identified by the hand-knitted stitches on one of his garments. However, even in the play, there is no reference to any decorative or Aran-type pattern. The garment referred to is a plain stocking and it is identified by the number of stitches, the quote being "it's the second one of the third pair I knitted, and I put up three score stitches, and I dropped four of them".
There is no record of any such event ever having taken place, nor is there any evidence to support there being a systematic tradition of family patterns. There is, however, a long-standing tradition of jumper patterns having a regional or local identification. It is said that the county, or parish, or township of a sailor or a fisherman could be identified by his sweater pattern. Additionally, the wearer's initials were traditionally knit into the bottom of the garment, which would have been a far better indication of identity than the stitching pattern.

Clan Aran patterns

The idea of clan Aran sweaters has widespread appeal to the Irish diaspora

Irish diaspora

thumb|Night Train with Reaper by London Irish artist [[Brian Whelan]] from the book Myth of Return, 2007The Irish diaspora consists of Irish emigrants and their descendants in countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, New Zealand, Mexico, South Africa,...

 and is often used as a marketing tool.. Most research concludes that there is no definitive evidence to support the concept of clan patterns, though it is possible that variations in design may have occurred in different families and regions. Anecdotal evidence varies on this point, with some older knitters saying that family patterns existed and others denying it.

Aran production today

While in the past, the majority of sweaters and other Aran garments were knitted by hand, today the majority of items for sale in Ireland and elsewhere are either machine knit or produced on a hand loom

Loom

A loom is a device used to weave cloth. The basic purpose of any loom is to hold the warp threads under tension to facilitate the interweaving of the weft threads...

. There are very few people still knitting sweaters by hand on a commercial basis.

Machine-knitted sweaters tend to use finer wool and have less complex patterns, since many of the traditional stitches cannot be reproduced this way. They are the least expensive option. Hand-looming allows more complicated stitches to be used, will have fewer stitches to the inch and be thicker. The best quality hand-loomed sweaters are almost indistinguishable from hand knit. Hand-knit sweaters tend to be more tightly knit, to have more complex stitch patterns and to be longer-lasting and they attract a significant price premium. By holding them up to light, the difference between the machine knit and hand knit is evident.