Craft & Heritage

The Last Knitters of Haapsalu

In a small Baltic town, a handful of women still turn single-ply wool into air — and have done so since the czars came for the mud baths.

I first saw a Haapsalu shawl pinned to black velvet in the back room of the town museum, and I could not believe it was knitted. The wool was so fine — single-ply 100/2, the women call it — that the entire shawl, a metre and a half square, passed through my grandmother’s wedding ring.

A Pattern Language Without Words

The patterns have names that read like pressed flowers in an old book: Lily of the Valley, Beech-Leaf, Crown Prince. Eha Tammik, now eighty-three, told me she has not used a chart since 1979. She winds the wool, counts the nupps, and watches the Baltic light through her kitchen window.

“The shawl must breathe. If you cannot pull it through a ring, you have knitted too tightly — and the shawl will not forgive you.”