Journal

A Maker’s Wardrobe: Swatching a WW2 Knitting Pattern

My mum’s craft room used to be full of my unfinished projects. Recently she got frustrated trying to clear it and started making things into cushions, bags, and pin cushions, giving them away to people. She handed one back to me at Christmas: a moth jumper from Susan Duckworth’s book, which I had clearly got halfway up the back and abandoned sometime in the 1980s. It is now a cushion. A rather nice one.

I don’t think of abandoned projects like that as failures. I think they’re often a symptom of curiosity. A project that got started because something was interesting, and then the interesting thing moved on. That’s fine. The problem comes when the abandoned things pile up and give the inner critic something to work with. The voices that say you never finish anything, you’ve got no staying power, look at all that wasted yarn. Those voices are very good at dimming creativity.

So over the last month I’ve been sorting through the studio. Frogging what can be frogged. Selling unfinished knits on Vinted (surprisingly brisk market for them). Binning the genuinely unsalvageable.

The cardigan that nearly wasn’t

But some of what came back to me wasn’t the hopeless-case category. It was the almost-finished category. Including a cardigan I made when I was sixteen, in colours not unlike the ones I still reach for now, which is essentially complete except for the front rib. That is all that was missing. It fits. It just doesn’t have the rib.

I am, apparently, a person who abandons projects at the final rib.

Also at the second sock past the heel turn. Also at the last twenty rows when my mind has already moved on to the next thing. The project goes into a bag in a cupboard and that’s that.

This is what I am trying to change with this project: not just to knit a cardigan, but to knit it differently than I have knitted before.

The pattern

This is part of my ongoing Maker’s Wardrobe series, and the cardigan I’m making is from Vogue Knitting Book No. 25, a wartime pattern book. I have a whole separate film about this book if you want the full context, but briefly: it’s from the Second World War, it has photographs by Lee Miller, and it was produced under wartime rationing conditions when making what you had last was the whole point.

It’s a single-size pattern. Designed for a 34-inch bust, which is not mine, so I’ll be regrading it. That’s a whole thing for another film.

The stitch is a wheat-ear rib, which is beautiful and quite architectural. 

Why I had to swatch (properly)

I have not historically been a reliable swatcher. Often the jumper has been the swatch. I’d knit a couple of rows, vaguely check it wasn’t going to be enormous, and cast on.

With this project, I had no choice. Because I need to regrade the pattern anyway, I need accurate measurements. And because the yarn is no longer available (but then, it’s a wartime pattern: you used what you had), I needed to work out what I was actually using.

I had four candidates:

• A lambswool and angora from John Arbon: beautiful fabric, too soft for the rib to show
• Dead stock cashmere from Todd and Duncan, Kinross: lovely, but slightly fuzzy, rib too flat
• Lambswool from Todd and Duncan, slightly heathery and marled: good rib definition, proper tweedy quality
• My own plant-dyed cotton, bundle-dyed with kitchen waste: much higher relief, very clear stitch, no fuzz at all

The swatches taught me things I couldn’t have found out any other way. Not just the fabric quality, which you can’t really assess from a ball, but the drape, the feel against the dresses I’m planning to wear this with, and the actual experience of knitting the stitch. The wheat-ear rib is not quite what I was expecting. Swatching gave me a chance to find that out before I was forty rows into a back.

I am now a reformed person on the subject of swatching. Reluctantly, but genuinely.

I’d love to know which yarn you think I should use. I’m torn between the marled lambswool and the plant-dyed cotton. Both have good arguments for them and I’ll explain those properly in the comments if you want to share your view.

What also came off the needles

Before I could start swatching in earnest for this project, I had a rule: finish what was on the needles first. In the previous film I said I wouldn’t cast on anything new until my Lavenda cardigan was complete.

It is complete. It even has the buttons sewn on.  It’s in the thumbnail!

The pattern is here in its original form.

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Comments: 5 (Add)

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Alison Grave 1781247394

Oh my goodness! You are transformed!! I am not a swatcher, so many things do not get past my imagination as I don’t want to waste wool and I know without swatching and hashing on (i.e just doing it, a good Fife saying) it probably will end badly. Perhaps a combination of Impatience and perfectionism?
I’m now going to have the first of my Friday treats and will watch your YouTube video and look forward to our studio chat at 5, many thanks for everything?

Alison Grave 1781247525

In reply to Alison Grave

? Should have been a star!

Ann Wharmby 1781255190

Most impressive and a great example to us all! I am not a knitter - I crochet, and usually Scrumble (see the books by Sylvia Cosh and James Walters from the 1980s) - and, as you describe yourself, I too have never been in the habit of planning things out in advance - serendipity often provides a not necessarily expected but interesting outcome. But not always. And there is a certain reluctance to undo once done, so any original vague intention at the outset often evolves with the 'work in progress'. I very much admire your reformed approach but I'm not convinced this particular leopard is about to change her spots, at least not any time soon; my approach to most things is too chaotic and random, so it's an excellent example I ought to follow...

As for your choice of yarn for the cardigan it's lovely to use own-dyed because you've been involved in the entire process. But I can't get away from wool as top favourite, it's just so lovely to work with and wear. So I'd go for the tweedy lambswool. That said I've finally just begun to spin some of the undercoat from our Welsh Springer Spaniel (now coming up to his eleventh birthday, so I've been collecting for a while). And as a mindful activity, as well as being more easily portable than a spinning wheel, (currently inaccessible but that's another story) I'm using a drop spindle. The fibre is unbelievably fine and the yarn is so soft, but nothing has the 'bounce' and elasticity of wool. What it will eventually become, assuming I spin it all, is another matter, a story for the future.

Thank you for your inspirational website and videos. They've got me back out of a crafting desert and into making things again.

Cathy Davies 1781275116

I love swatching for its own sake and not necessarily for a pattern. I learn so much about different yarns that way. Last winter I must have knit over 100 tiny swatches mostly from handspun yarns, and I ended up making a breed display for my local fiber guild (picture attached). As for what yarn to use; use your hand-dyed cotton! You can always use the lambswool another time.

Kathie Hoyer 1781293225

That green is lovely. Plus you already have the other colors in your sweater collection!
I'm no knitter but I love listening to you talk about your projects - I look forward to every Friday and it's my break-time at work! Thanks!