Our love affair with the vintage fair isle look continues, and while knitting from the original instructions may seem straightforward, I sometimes get questions from concerned fair isle pattern buyers about whether the instructions are written or charted – this blogpost is intended to encourage those nervous souls to dive in and chart your own! It’s pretty common for vintage fair isle patterns to be written with no chart representation and being a lazy moo myself I always appreciate the appeal of charted patterns for ease and speed, but there’s also something rather satisfying about deciphering the written instructions, like revealing a secret code, so here are some tips for how to do it.

I’ll use this 1940s jumper with fair isle yoke that I’m working on at the moment as an example – as you can see you’ll obviously have a visual clue from the pattern picture so you’re not exactly working in the dark. It’s also fairly common for patterns from this era to suggest which colours you should use, although don’t feel you have to stick to their suggestions. This particular pattern suggests natural, black, blue and red which I’ve decided to stick to.

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Well hang out the bunting and slice the cake, it’s a Skiff blogpost … just catching up with some pictures from finished projects and thought I’d share this one. I know what you’re thinking – I’m looking pretty pleased with myself right? In my defence I earned that smug look … this blouse caused me a fair amount of grief as I was suffering from knitter’s elbow throughout the knitwork. This sounds like a ridiculously mild complaint in the bigger scheme of things (and it is), but is a common knitter’s problem along the lines of tennis elbow (I’ve never been near a racket in my life). I now wear a bizarre strap thingy on my arm when I knit and can be regularly seen doing strange arm exercises to prevent a comeback.

The classic combination of 2-ply and 3.25mm needles was taken from Vogue Knitting No.35 (1949) and knitted up to a tension of 14 rows to the inch in a tiny moss-stitch … let’s just say it’s not the quickest thing I’ve ever knitted (although it still beats my 14-year-long pimped Vogue shirt), but it’s here in the world and I’m making the most of it.

My friend Sibilla took the picture round the back of a local ancient church where we then proceeded to have a crafty cig and a couple of miniatures before the vicar caught us.

Smug? Damn right.

I’ve been knitting from vintage patterns for a few years now, but I never stop learning. Case in point is this wonderful pattern for a Sports Jumper with fabric trim from a 1935 edition of The Needlewoman.

In theory it looks pretty straightforward – the bottom half is knitted from left to right in a horizontal ridge (knit row, purl row, purl row, knit row), the back and front yokes are knitted vertically with increases on the front yokes to fit around the, fake (as I thought) pockets. I always do an initial sketch based on the measurements, tension and instructions from the original pattern, and from that I re-size it if necessary and create a new sketch … I followed my usual procedure in this case, but just couldn’t get my head around the top front yokes: the instructions show that a 3″ stretch on one side of both pieces is knitted in stocking stitch and I couldn’t work out from the picture where that should fit.

Writing it out now, it seems so obvious but I spent ages agonising over it, and was on the verge of writing this off as a pattern mistake and over-ruling it, creating my own version. Then I remembered one of my own rules – never forget to THOROUGHLY comb the ‘make-up’ instructions. I’d made the fatal mistake of assuming I’d find out all I needed to know about the anatomy of this jumper just by looking at the picture which meant I just quickly gone over the most vital part of how to actually put it together. Are you one step ahead of me? Yes my friends, the pockets weren’t fake, the stocking stitch edges in the top yokes were the pocket backs.

I’m feeling pretty stupid now I’m writing this as it seems so obvious, but it stands as a valuable lesson to other vintage knitters … don’t get complacent and make assumptions about the designs you’re knitting from, vintage patterns constantly amaze me with their little details and surprises. Read the pattern once, then turn down the music/TV/dog and re-read it without any distractions, make sure you’ve got a complete understanding of how the garment is put together.

Here’s another tip for free: don’t try and work it out at 9 o’clock at night, half a bottle of wine down, with Queens of the Stone Age shouting at you in the background (I mean on the iPod, they weren’t actually in the kitchen arguing with me). I’m writing this in the morning with a bit of Tom Waits & Crystal Gayle playing quietly and a clear head, and it seems blatantly and embarrassingly obvious now (heh, sheepish sigh).