Knitting Trivia
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This knitting trivia quiz has 64 free questions with answers and runs from the oldest surviving knitted socks, dug up in Cairo, to the diver who knitted a Team GB cardigan in the Olympic stands. Along the way you will meet William Lee's stocking frame, the Prince of Wales in a Fair Isle jumper, the invented 'meanings' of Aran stitches, Madame Defarge's coded knitting, and the woman who started yarn bombing with a door-handle cosy in Houston. It is built for anyone who knits, crochets, or just loves a good origin story: knitting circles and yarn shops looking for a quiz night, craft teachers, and trivia fans who want something other than sport and geography. There are easy questions on knit versus purl and where cashmere comes from, and genuinely hard ones on 16th-century purl stitches and Guinness records. Every answer has been checked against a reference page, mostly Wikipedia and Guinness World Records, so the explanations are safe to repeat at your next stitch-and-bitch. Play through all 61, then share your score.
30 of 64 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The oldest known true knitted artifacts are cotton socks from which country?
Egypt
Egypt's socks already show fine gauge and complex colourwork, so knitting was probably practised there well before these finds.
Q 02Which looping technique worked with one needle made sturdy socks and mittens before knitting was known?
Nålebinding
Nålebinding works short lengths of yarn much like sewing, and some ancient pieces once thought to be knitting turned out to be made with it.
Q 03Europe's earliest known knitted items were made by knitters of which faith, employed by Castilian royals?
Muslim
Muslim knitters worked the Arabic word baraka, 'blessing', into a cushion cover buried with the Christian prince Fernando de la Cerda.
Q 04The Buxtehude Altar, painted around 1400, shows which holy figure knitting?
Virgin Mary
The Virgin Mary knits Christ's seamless tunic on four needles, the garment medieval tradition said he wore until his crucifixion.
Q 05The cardigan is named after an earl who led which cavalry charge?
The Charge of the Light Brigade
The Charge of the Light Brigade made Lord Cardigan a brief hero at home, and the knitted waistcoat named after him became a hot commodity.
Q 06Red silk knitted stockings were found among the burial clothes of which Medici duchess?
Eleonora de Toledo
Eleonora de Toledo was long rumoured to have died of grief after one son killed another, but tests on her bones confirmed that malaria killed her.
Q 07Which protest movement began in 1811 among Nottinghamshire framework knitters?
The Luddites
The Luddites smashed so many knitting frames that Parliament made frame-breaking a capital offence in 1812.
Q 08Which ruler incorporated the Worshipful Company of Framework Knitters by letters patent in 1657?
Oliver Cromwell
After the Restoration, the company Oliver Cromwell had incorporated applied to Charles II and won a fresh royal charter in 1663.
Q 09Fair Isle knitting takes its name from an island in which archipelago?
Shetland
Shetland's Fair Isle knitters traded with passing ships, rowing far out to barter their brightly coloured knitwear.
Q 10Fair Isle's 1920s craze is credited to which royal, who wore the jumpers in public?
The Prince of Wales
The Prince of Wales wore his Fair Isle jumper to play golf, and the pattern has been linked with golf ever since.
Q 11Aran jumpers are named after islands off the west coast of which country?
Ireland
Ireland's Aran jumper emerged as a product in the 1930s, after Muriel Gahan's Country Shop in Dublin began selling island knitwear.
Q 12The myth that Aran patterns identified drowned fishermen is often traced to a 1904 play by whom?
J. M. Synge
J. M. Synge's Riders to the Sea identifies a drowned man by a sock his sister knitted, from the stitches she dropped, not by any jumper pattern.
Q 13Aran knitting is often traced to which body set up in 1891 to relieve western poverty?
Congested Districts Board
The Congested Districts Board encouraged island families to knit garments to sell, and a knitwear industry grew on the islands.
Q 21Which organisation's c.1918 poster told the US home front 'Our boys need sox – Knit your bit'?
The Red Cross
The Red Cross wanted socks because dry pairs helped soldiers in wet trenches ward off trench foot.
Q 22Cowichan sweaters, with shawl collars and bold motifs, are made by Coast Salish knitters based where in Canada?
Vancouver Island
After Vancouver Island's Cowichan knitters protested a look-alike 2010 Olympic sweater, they won a deal to sell their own at the Hudson's Bay Company's Vancouver store.
Q 23The knitted Monmouth cap of soldiers and sailors is named after a town in which country?
Wales
Wales's Monmouth caps kept their name even after much of their making moved to Bewdley in Worcestershire.
Q 14Heinz Edgar Kiewe, who fabricated the romantic 'meanings' of Aran stitches, ran what kind of business?
A yarn shop
Kiewe, who ran a yarn shop in Oxford, even claimed that Daniel in the Book of Kells wore Aran-patterned stockings, a claim historians dismiss.
Q 15Which folk group popularised Aran jumpers by wearing them on The Ed Sullivan Show?
The Clancy Brothers
The Clancy Brothers wore sweaters their mother had sent against the New York cold, and manager Marty Erlichman made them the group's stage trademark.
Q 16What is the undyed cream wool yarn of traditional Aran jumpers called?
Báinín
Báinín was often spun from unwashed wool, so each wash left the sweater whiter and softer but less rainproof.
Q 17The gansey, a tightly knitted seaman's sweater, takes its name from an island in which group?
The Channel Islands
The Channel Islands' Guernsey lent the sweater its name, which travelled so far that the Norwegian word for a sweater, genser, comes from it.
Q 18What is the diamond-shaped piece knitted into the underarm of a traditional gansey called?
A gusset
A gusset adds extra fabric where sleeve meets body, taking the strain off the underarm so the wearer can move freely.
Q 19The finest traditional lace shawls from Unst were judged by their ability to be drawn through what?
A wedding ring
A wedding ring was the test for island lace, which became popular in England because Queen Victoria loved it.
Q 20Which Danish TV drama's detective made a patterned Faroese jumper famous?
The Killing
The Killing's star Sofie Gråbøl picked the jumper herself from wardrobe suggestions before filming began.
Q 24Which knitting stitch looks like a knit stitch seen from the back of the fabric?
Purl
Purl rows form raised ridges beside knit rows, which is how shadow knitting hides pictures that appear only when viewed at an angle.
Q 25Knitting every single row in knit stitches produces which fabric?
Garter stitch
Garter stitch lies flat instead of curling, so it can edge a garment without needing any other finish.
Q 26Which smooth knitted fabric has columns of stacked V shapes on its front?
Stockinette
Stockinette's edges naturally curl, so garments knitted in it usually start with a hem or a flatter border.
Q 27What is the stretchy knitted pattern of alternating vertical columns, used on cuffs and hems, called?
Ribbing
Ribbing naturally draws the fabric in, so a ribbed edge fits snugly without any extra shaping.
Q 28What is creating the first stitches on the needle at the start of knitting called?
Casting on
Casting on by the popular long-tail method means guessing the tail length first, and a tail too short means unravelling and starting again.
Q 29Ripping out rows of knitting by pulling the yarn free is humorously known among knitters as what?
Frogging
Frogging is said to come from 'rip it, rip it', which sounds like a frog's croak, and crocheters use the word for unravelling too.
Q 30Continental-style knitting fell from favour in Britain and the US in WWII because of its link to which country?
Germany
Elizabeth Zimmermann spent decades coaxing American knitters back to the faster left-hand method.