A 1946 Jumper

A recent donation of assorted publications to the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection included several patterns from old magazines, including one from a magazine I had never heard of: Weekly Welcome and Woman's Way.  

Weekly Welcome and Woman's Way, March 30th 1946.  

It was an issue from 1946 - number 2493, so it was a long-lived publication already.   Fortunately, the British Library knows all about it.  It was first published in 1896, as Weekly Welcome, so 1946 was its 50th anniversary.  It had a brief change of title to Woman's Welcome, in 1939, then changed to Weekly Welcome and Woman's Way and stuck with that until 1955, when it reverted to Weekly Welcome.  It was incorporated into My Weekly (which is still current) in 1960.

With the rather tatty cover is the pattern for the cover jumper - a slip-stitch design in three colours: light coral, dark coral and brown.  I think the cover photo has been re-coloured from a black-and -white photo, because the background colour is a definite red rather than 'light coral'.  I guess that the red was chosen because there was already red in the masthead and other cover text.  Never mind - it's a pretty jumper, and here's the pattern in full:

The yarn specified is 3-ply super fingering - only 4 oz. (about 100 gm.) of the main colour.  Clothes rationing was still in force in 1946, even though the war was over, so women couldn't afford to use much wool in knitting a jumper.  But even though it sounds like a very fine yarn, it's knitted on size 11 (3mm.) needles for the rib, and size 8 (4mm.) for the rest.  Perhaps a modern 4-ply (fingering weight)  yarn would work - you would have to knit a swatch and match the stated tension.  You would also have to adjust the sizing, probably: it's written for only one size (34 in. bust) and is very short, although that is easy to change.

So if you'd like to knit a 1940s (but not quite war-time) jumper, or like the look of the slip-stitch pattern, you could try it.