A Quick Baby Jacket

A couple of weeks ago, my sister asked me if I would knit something for a new baby - a friend's grandchild, who was then expected imminently. Margaret would have made something herself (she knitted something for the baby's older brother when he was born), but she's finding knitting too painful for her hands. So we got together in the knitting wool department of John Lewis, and chose a pattern and the wool, and I set to work on a baby jacket. And here it is:

Margaret wanted something that would be suitable for either a girl or a boy.  I wanted something quick to knit.  So we looked through the baby patterns for double knitting.

King Cole 3803

The pattern we chose has two versions of a jacket - one is supposedly for a baby girl (peplum, hood) and the other for a baby boy (no peplum, collar).  Margaret decided she would like a combination (peplum + collar), and  picked neutral colours (soft grey and ecru).  The yarn is Erika Knight for John Lewis Baby DK, machine washable wool.  (The baby's mother wanted natural fibres.)  Very soft, good to knit with.

I really dislike sewing up, so I knitted the body in the round up to the armholes, and knitted the sleeves in the round too.  I find it difficult to get seams in cuffs and welts to look neat, so they are best avoided.  I posted the jacket to Margaret earlier this week.  It had buttonholes but no buttons, as in the photo  - adding the buttons is her job.  And while I was knitting it, the baby arrived - it's a boy.

It's very satisfying to be able to knit an entire garment so quickly, and I think it's turned out rather well.  Eli will look very smart.

And the pattern leaflet is now in the Guild collection.  We need to keep up-to-date when we can.

PS June 2017.  I've just been sent a photo of Eli wearing his jacket - and it still fits him, though he started out big and has grown a lot.  So nice to see it being worn.

1926 Baby Outfits

Today is the Queen's 90th birthday, so I thought I would show you what a 1926 baby might have worn,  (I had that thought before I broke my wrists, so fortunately had already scanned the images for this post.)

Beehive Knitting Booklet No. 27

In the mid-1920s, babies were dressed in several layers of woolliness, at least according to the spinners of knitting wool.  (Possibly a biassed view.)  The Beehive booklet illustrated, for a 'Knitted Outfit for Baby' was I think issued in 1925.  (Although Patons and Baldwins had merged in 1920, the two parts of the company continued with their separate series of Beehive Knitting Booklets (Baldwins) and Helps to Knitters (Patons) for several years after that.)

The baby on the cover is (visibly) wearing a bonnet, a coat, mittens with thumbs, and a garment covering everything below its waist - 'overall drawers'.  There would be at least one more layer of wool underneath the visible layer.

Altogether, the booklet has patterns for 15 garments:  a vest; a 'knicker pilch' (to go over the nappy); a petticoat; bootees and gaiters; three coats; a Dutch bonnet and a cap; mittens, with and without thumbs; overall  drawers; a shawl and a pram cover.

I assume that the booklet was intended to cater for both boy and girl babies, and I think that all the garments are intended for either, except that possibly the Dutch bonnet is for a girl and the cap for a boy.

Pram Cover

And every single thing, apart from the shawl, is trimmed and fastened with ribbons, which would now be considered a strangling hazard, surely?

Most baby photos back then were taken indoors, often in a studio, and the baby was in a dress or wrapped in a shawl.  So we don't usually see the full range of baby clothes that they would be put into to go out in the pram, say.  But we can try to imagine 90 year olds, such as the Queen, David Attenborough (90 next month), and my aunt Beryl, as tiny babies all those years ago, and being dressed in an outfit like the one in the Beehive booklet.  Perhaps not quite so much woolliness, most of the time, except outdoors in winter.        

For a Royal Baby

This week, we were sorting several boxes of Peter Pan patterns in the Knitting & Crochet Guild collection, and found several copies of this free pattern leaflet, "A layette for someone special".   It must have been issued around the time of a royal birth, so that you could make a set of baby clothes fit for a prince or princess, for a baby in your own family.  I'm guessing that the royal baby was Prince William (born 1982), because the booklet on the table in the foreground says "The Royal Wedding" and I think refers to the wedding of Prince William's parents the previous year.

It was a very timely find, since another royal birth was imminent, and the new princess, Prince William's daughter, has arrived today! 

A Sweater for Beatrix

Beatrix was born in November and I knitted a sweater for her that was handed over at Christmas, via her grandparents.   I have not yet seen her in it, but I have seen a photo - it looks a little big for her just now, but will fit her better before the end of the winter.  It's knitted in Wendy Merino DK, so I intended it for wear this winter, to keep her cosy.  She wears it with the cuffs turned back, as they are shown on the cover of the pattern leaflet below - the sleeves fit her better that way. 

   
(It's actually a lovely greeny-blue colour - it's hard to get a photo that shows the colour at all accurately, which I have found before with green/blue shades.)

Patons 7957

The pattern is from a Patons leaflet that I have had for years - the leaflet has the date 1985 printed in it, so I assume I bought it then and perhaps I intended to knit it for my daughter.  But I never did.   The neckline is intriguing - the front and back finish in two long triangular pieces at each side, which overlap.  There are no shoulder seams or any kind of fastening at the shoulders, so there is plenty of room for it to go over the baby's head, but it should then fit snugly around the neck.  And there are straight seams to join the sleeves to the body.  

In fact, I didn't assemble it exactly according to the instructions - there was meant to be much more overlap of the back and front, but then the neck opening entirely disappeared, so I had to adjust it.  It's a nice pattern, though - I like the texture of the stitch pattern, made of little triangles in stocking stitch and reverse stocking stitch.   And I like the way that the diagonal edges of the triangular overlapping pieces parallel the triangles of the stitch pattern - that is very neat. I hope Beatrix gets plenty of wear out of it for a few weeks, before she grows out of it. 

Baby Jacket

I have just finished knitting a jacket for Noah, who is three months old.  The pattern is one I have used  before -   Baby Sophisticate by Linden Down  (free via Ravelry). It is entirely seamless (hurray!) and uses Aran weight yarn (or in this case, DK used double), so is quick to knit. 

The buttons are ladybirds - not very sophisticated, in fact, but cute.  And Noah looks extremely cute wearing it.  (Actually, it's also hard to look sophisticated when you have to wear a bib all the time to catch dribbles, so I don't think I need to apologise for the ladybirds.)  

As Seen on TV

It's a bit late to write about this (in fact, very late), but I am going to anyway.  Last month, BBC4 broadcast Knitting's Golden Age,  a documentary about knitting from around 1920 to the 1980s, which the programme makers decided was the golden age of knitting, although there was a brief acknowledgement at the end that knitting is once again very popular.  

Angharad, who works alongside me on the Knitting & Crochet Guild's collection, appeared on the programme.  She showed some of the 1950s knitted baby clothes that we have in the collection, mainly matinee coats and cardigans.  The little matinee jacket that she presented is very pretty, with lacy knitted hearts that are embroidered afterwards in blue.

 

 It was knitted from a Patons & Baldwins pattern,  evidently a best seller, judging by the number of copies that I have found.   Perhaps its popularity was because if you wanted to follow the "blue for a boy, pink for a girl" rule, you could hastily embroider the hearts in the right colour after the baby had arrived.

Patons 382

Another baby cardigan was shown in the programme too - in very fine yarn, with the skirt, collar and cuffs in feather-and-fan stitch.  It's beautifully made. We haven't yet identified the pattern (if there was one) - let me know if you recognise it.

Angharad  also showed some soft toys knitted in oddments of yarn, and a very small doll with a complete outfit of knitted clothes.

The poodle (?) has evidently had a hard life and been much loved.   Mr and Mrs Panda are a favourite with the KCG volunteers (because they look perpetually surprised).  We speculate whether they are actually married, or perhaps brother and sister, or just good friends.

And here's the little doll.  

A Best Selling Pattern Booklet

In working on the Knitting and Crochet Guild's collections, I recently branched out from sorting magazines to sorting pattern leaflets, of which we have thousands.   (Many thousands, we think - hard to tell, when they are mostly in unsorted boxes and haven't been separated into different spinners.)

We have been trying to make sense of the Patons and Baldwins numbering system (so far without a great deal of success).  Patons and Baldwins were two separate long-established spinners when they merged in 1920, and the company still exists (as Patons) in the Coats group.  There are a lot of pattern leaflets and booklets to sort that were issued by Patons & Baldwins from the 1920s onwards, and I have been working on some from the later 1940s and 1950s - 9 boxes of them.

Because they haven't been properly sorted before, there are many that are duplicated, and I think that the ones that we have multiple copies of are likely to be those that P&B sold a lot of.  It's interesting to see which they are - we have catalogues of leaflets from various dates, but they don't give any idea of which were successful.  So what kind of patterns turn up over and over again in the boxes of unsorted leaflets?  The answer is, overwhelmingly, patterns for baby clothes.

One booklet in particular, The Quickerknit Baby Book, I found over and over again and it had clearly been reprinted several times, because there were copies with several different prices.  In fact, it must have been Patons & Baldwins best-selling booklet ever.  It was first published in 1956, and according to Michael Harvey in his book Patons: A Story of Handknitting, it was still selling strongly in 1985 and had by then sold 3 million copies - an astonishing number.  

Why was this booklet so  popular, over such a long period? By chance, I found in the collections a copy of the P&B list of new booklets for February 1956, when SC44 first appeared, and it says that it "is the first publication to feature Patons Quickerknit Baby Wool, Patonised".  Quickerknit Baby Wool is described as "thicker than 4-ply and finer than double knitting" - evidently double knitting was not thought suitable for babies, but this would knit up more quickly than 4-ply.  "Patonised" wool was treated to be shrink-resistant. 

Quickerknit Baby Wool must have proved very popular, and that would explain why the first patterns published for it would have sold well.  But why did SC44 continue to sell for 30 years?   The patterns in it don't seem very unusual or especially attractive.  There are two cardigans, a matinee coat, a pair of bootees and a pram set. The pram set consists of a bonnet, a coat, a pair of leggings and a pair of mitts, so that the baby is clothed from head to toe, literally, in woolliness.  Who was knitting pram sets in 1985?  They were probably very necessary in the 1950s, when babies spent a lot of time in their prams.  (There were far fewer cars than now, so prams were the main way of transporting a baby.  There was also a theory that babies should be put outside in their prams for day-time naps, to get the benefit of fresh air - although before the Clean Air Act came into force, it's doubtful whether there was much fresh air in towns and cities.)   But by 1985, in my experience, babies were no longer wearing clothes of this sort.        

So I don't know why SC44 continued to be such a huge best-seller.  The baby isn't even especially cute. 

Sophisticated Baby

Over the holidays I knitted a cardigan for a friend's baby boy, due just before Christmas. Daniel arrived on December 26th and I went to see them today and handed over the cardigan.

I had forgotten how tiny new babies are, and I really cannot remember my daughter being so small.  He is, as his mother says, a poppet.  The cardigan is supposedly the 0-3 months size  and looks much too big at the moment, but he'll grow fast and I expect it will fit him before spring arrives.

The pattern is Baby Sophisticate by Linden Down  (free from her web site or via Ravelry).   It's a quick knit in Aran weight yarn.  It's knitted top down - no seams, which is great.  I found the pattern really well thought out.  For instance, the shawl collar is made by picking up stitches all the way round the edge of the cardigan, and I usually hate picking up stitches.  But that's because usually you are only told how many stitches to pick up on each section, and  you have to work out the spacing for yourself (and often get it wrong first time).   Here, the first stitch of every row in the body of the cardigan is slipped, and then you pick up one stitch in every slipped stitch.  Dead easy.  I like the shaping of the shawl collar using short rows, too - sophisticated but easy to follow. 

This project was also my first serious attempt at Continental knitting (holding the yarn in the left hand). I saw someone knitting that way a few months ago, for the first time, and she was so fast that I was amazed. I decided that I should try it - I'm hoping that if and when I can knit easily in the Continental fashion, I will be able to knit faster than before. It's obviously not sensible to switch knitting styles in the middle of a project, because your tension might change, so a small project seemed like a good one to find out whether I could do it or not. This was also a good choice because it is all in stocking stitch and garter stitch - I haven't attempted rib yet.   It seemed very clumsy and awkward to begin with, but I am getting better at it.  My tension seems to be fairly even, somewhat surprisingly.  I'm not very fast yet, but I'm sure I will get faster with practice.   I'm now working on a bigger project - more on that later.