The imaginative leap from making stockings with some detail to larger items in which all sorts of patterns could be arranged had to do with a confident and shared experimentation. To understand the complexity of some of the early sweaters is to realise that they were often composed of horizontal lines of some 400 stitches in rough homespun wool in which 12 stitches or 20 rows made up roughly one inch. Each stitch on every row had to be correctly worked to ensure the exact motif. Each pattern or motif, such as a cable or a diamond, had a specific number of stitches which gives some idea of the arithmetic involved let alone the decorative and topographic skills required to carry out series of designs successfully. Making such a sweater was, therefore, a considerable challenge. The achievement of the island knitters was the transformation of a workday seaman's garment into something unique.

There was also the question of shaping and fit and final assembly said by many knitters to be the most difficult parts. The advent of thicker needles and softer yarns saved time and labour. One of the most celebrated knitting collectors, Gladys Thompson, an authority on Guernseys, Jerseys and Arans wrote in 1969 of the early Aran sweaters that "they caused me many sleepless nights working out the patterns... they are too lovely to be lost and some record must be kept before they become a forgotten craft".

The woman who ensured their survival and who figures most prominently in the story of Aran knitting is Dr Muriel Gahan. Founder of Country Workers Limited and the Irish Homespun Society, she dedicated her life to keeping alive Irish country crafts such as weaving, basket making and knitting In December 1930, the Country Shop was opened as an outlet for these traditional crafts in the basement of an elegant Georgian building in St. Stephen's Green in Dublin. It was to become one of the city's best-loved landmarks and its restaurant and coffee shop a popular gathering place.

A few years later Dr Gahan visited the Aran Islands for the first time. Through her friend Elizabeth Rivers, an artist who had come to live on Inishmore in 1935 she was put in touch with the best knitters in the area, mostly in the west of the island, and started to buy from them. These were the first Aran handknits to go on sale.

In 1936 a German textile journalist, Heinz Edgar Kiewe, who had a needlework shop in Oxford, bought one of these sweaters in the Country Shop on a visit to Dublin. He later described it in The Sacred History of Knitting in 1967: "It was a peculiar whiskery looking chunk of sweater in Biblical white... to us it looked too odd for words being hard as a board".

According to Bishop Richard Ruttin A History of Handknitting (1987), Kiewe then showed the sweater to Mary Thomas, an influential knitting journalist who published a picture of it with a partial description in her 1943 book of knitting patterns. In the richly detailed effects of this sweater, Kiewe perceived aesthetic links with early Celtic art which led to a misleading and persistent belief that the sweaters were centuries old.

From The Aran Sweater by Deirdre McQuillan. Click here for more information on the book.