Julia astonished me last week by saying, "Mom, I'd like a 40s Fair Isle vest." I nearly fell off my chair. Julia, for whom even Shepherd Sock is "too scratchy"?? She is getting very interested in "retro" and period clothing, mainly 1940s. She had seen some modern versions on a website somewhere, and showed me what had piqued her interest, although when I started cross-examining it turned out that she liked the actual 40s details better -- the higher waist and shorter ribbed welt, the slightly-smaller armholes and narrower armhole ribbing, and the generally-closer fit. Poking around on various websites looking for free patterns, there were quite a number of ones that were close, but none with all of the details plus a set of Fair Isle patterns that she liked. I was on the verge of cobbling the right shape garment with color-your-own Fair Isle patterns, when I traced an image I found on Pinterest to FabForties.co.uk (formerly The Vintage Knitting Lady) where I found the above Bairns-Wear sleeveless pullover for mere pennies -- almost as good as free.
With a pattern in hand at last, I sat down with a chart-making software and graphed the first two patterns from the written-out instructions -- all three patterns have a 10-stitch repeat -- in something vaguely resembling the suggested colors, which are a burgundy ground with maize (the lighter yellow here), ice blue, berberis (the gold), sea green, and "Queen Mary Rose". I didn't even get to the sea green and rose before I knew something was very wrong. I tried it again, thinking maybe I was a stitch off somewhere and things were misaligned, but it was exactly the same. The next day, it occurred to me that since -- nowadays at least -- Fair Isle is usually worked in the round, and these instructions are for knitting flat, maybe the designer had worked it in the round and whoever typed it up hadn't realized that, so I tried charting it with every row worked as though from the front, and got this --
which en masse looks like this --
which looks much more likely. I'm still pretty sure that that bottom band is not the same one as in the knitted-up slipover in the photo ...
Still oddly irregular for Fair Isle, but not as Chinese-dragon-like as the one from the instructions! (Chinese dragons are all very well when you want Chinese dragons, of course -- maybe not so much in a 1940s Fair-Isle slipover.)
As a relief from those garish chart colors, here is what we worked out from the Knit Picks "Palette" line -- with the main mousy-brown color "repeated" between the pattern colors --
Fingers crossed that they go well together in real life!
To be continued ...!
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