Museum Waistcoat

It's taken a while, but I finally have a finished waistcoat.  Now I just need to wait for the autumn leaves to provide a suitable matching backdrop.  It will need something very plain under it.

You may remember that the basic concept here is drawn from a sweater in the museum in Lerwick which has different patterns for each lozenge in a horizontal row.  There the peerie bands were just about the only thing that provided a bit of continuity. I chose to use a range of peerie patterns as well.

Early on I decided to use a rich golden brown as the back and bands.  This is something Sacha Kagan used to do with her waistcoats and I feel it tones them down a bit.

I always feel that in Fair Isle the eye seeks out rhythm and repetition, either in repeated shapes or in bands of colour.  Fair Isle patterns are symmetrical and often very simple in their geometry.  I decided to use only two lozenge patterns in each horizontal band, but this still added up to a lot of variety.  I used the same colours throughout to provide some continuity.

I was aiming at the same sort of rich nut-brown palette as in the long-line pullover designed by  Lesley Stanfield  in  "Traditional Knitting from the Scottish and Irish Isles".    Mine does not quite achieve this.  In fact, the fawn background colour seems to read as a) vintage and b) masculine.  It is the sort of waistcoat one of the men in "The Imitation Game" might have worn.

As an exercise in sampling different designs it worked very well.  Some of the lozenges work much better than others, and could be used for a whole jumper by themselves.  This is particularly so when the colour changes coincide with the pattern elements.

It was certainly interesting to chart out the designs row by row and then to see them knitted up.  The finished item has that timeless quality which was apparent even as I was knitting it.  I hope that it will be enjoyable to wear.