Vintage Aero and Clover Knitting Needles in Leather Tube, c. 1950–1980

The Piece

A working knitter's set of straight needles kept in a leather tube. The tube is a slim cylinder of tan leather with a push fit cap, patinated to a deep honey at the handled end, of the kind sold for needles and for knitting pins through the middle of the last century.

Inside are several pairs across a wide range of gauges. Two heavy wooden needles in pale birch, turned with knob ends, are branded along the shaft with the maker name and the metric size. A number of pairs in grey coated light alloy carry moulded plastic end knobs, some stamped with the maker name and the country, others with a script trade name. One pair still wears its original printed paper band with the size and the shop price, which is the detail that fixes the group in time better than anything else in it.

History & Provenance

The alloy needles stamped Aero England come from Abel Morrall of Redditch in Worcestershire, a firm founded in 1785 and one of the great names of the English needle trade. Redditch was to needles what Sheffield was to cutlery, and by 1961 Abel Morrall employed more than four hundred people making hypodermic needles, sewing needles and the Aero range of knitting pins. Aero was the brand that put lightweight coated aluminium needles into British hands, and they were exported in quantity to the United States.

The wooden needles branded Clover come from the Japanese needlework house of that name, and the pair carrying a script trade name on the knob are continental European. A working knitter accumulated needles the way a carpenter accumulated chisels, one purchase at a time from whatever shop was nearest, so a mixed group of English, Japanese and European makers in one tube is not a failure of consistency. It is the evidence that somebody used these.

The surviving paper band is the dating anchor. Printed bands of that pattern, carrying a size and a price in dollars and cents at that level, belong to the decades when Aero needles were being imported into the American market in volume, which runs from the 1950s through the 1970s. The coated alloy with moulded plastic knobs is of the same period; the earlier needles were bare steel or bone, the later ones moved to bright plastics and then to circular cables.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

For anyone who knits these are simply good needles, and the heavy wooden pair in particular is the sort of thing that has become expensive to buy new. For everyone else the leather tube is the object: stood on a shelf beside books it reads as a document case or a drawing tube, and the needles fanned out of it make one of the better small still lifes available for a shop counter or a craft room. It is also a genuinely nice gift for a knitter, which is a harder thing to find than it sounds.