My dear husband, who has an internal thermostat roughly equivalent to the Sahara Desert, was puttering out in the garage one late night last winter when he came in slapping his arms and saying, "Honey, I need a sweater!" This took me so much by surprise that it was some time before I could actually pick up some needles, but here it is at last. It was meant to be a Christmas gift, although the bronchitis that we all came down with after Thanksgiving delayed the finishing by a couple of weeks — it wasn’t so much that I didn’t feel like knitting (although there was that at times), it was that David was sick too, and therefore home and underfoot, and it was meant to be something of a surprise.
He wanted something warm, but not as warm as a full sweater; his only requests last winter were that it be "plain" and "blue". Regretfully, I had to set aside my dreams of cables or even relatively sober Fair Isles, but these I hope to carefully insinuate into his wardrobe in time, and I was still happy to spend some hours poring over vintage British patterns, delighted by their equally vintage captions.
"Trim and smart because of its extreme simplicity."
"For golfing, gardening or just ‘pottering around.’"
As Yorkshire Tweed is, alas, discontinued, Rowan recommends Rowanspun 4-Ply or Scottish/Harris Tweed 4-Ply as substitutions. Rowanspun 4-Ply, Yorkshire Tweed’s previous incarnation, can still be found in some quantities.
"Every man needs a slipover!"
The shaping of this slipover is based on the vest chart given in Ann Budd’s extraordinarily useful Knitter’s Handy Book of Patterns and on a number of vintage patterns. Dad’s Favorite Slipover, which will shortly be available in the Original Patterns album in the sidebar, is a men’s V-neck sleeveless slipover with traditional shaping, sized to fit a 37 (42, 46, 51) in. / 94 (106.5, 117, 129.5) cm chest.
A Bluestocking Knits 
Leave a comment