February 1966: Flair for Tots

My February project (So glad 2024 is a leap year! It gave me one more day to get this blog post in on time) was this wonderful “Flair for Tots” set for a little girl. I made the coat-jacket and hat, but not the leggings.

The set certainly has plenty of flair, and “Flair” is also the name of the slightly heavier-than-DK wool-synthetic mix yarn that it is written for. I decided to use Soft Merino by Wolle Rödel, which is 100% wool, quite soft, and give me the correct tension of 19 stitches in 4 inches on 5 mm needles. The intended recipient (the daughter of a nice colleague, for whom I had already made both this “Practical coat” and this “Sunday Best Dress“) requested yellow and it looks like she was perfectly on trend — as soon as I bought the wool and started knitting, I started noticing how many people I saw in the course of a day were wearing a similar bright canary yellow.

The jacket pattern starts at the hem with a k7, p1 flattened rib. I made the back and fronts in one piece to avoid seams. The pattern switches to stocking-stitch a couple of inches before the armhole openings to make room for the belt (a simple strip of 6-stitch cable knit separately and sewn on later). The front bands are knitted along with the fronts and are exactly the width of one flattened rib, doubled over with a slip stitch fold line and double buttonholes.

In the pattern, the white wool trim at the collar (made separately and sewn on later) and cuffs is the same “Flair” wool used to make the rest of the set, but fluffed up by brushing with a teazle (aka teasel, teasle) brush. It’s a brush with metal tines for back-combing wool the same way you might tease your hair with a rat-tail comb, and with the same effect: it breaks and felts some of the fibres, creating a fluffy-blanket effect. Occasionally, there’s a pattern in an older Stitchcraft for brushed wool items (usually a baby blanket), and, there, readers are advised to send their finished knitting to a special service to get it brushed “for a very reasonable price.” By 1966, I guess anyone could buy a teazle brush and do their own brushing on the knitted trims.

All well and good, but these days one can also just buy fluffy yarn, and I saved myself some time and trouble by doing that. The white contrast yarn is Luxury Alpaca by Rico Design, a 63% alpaca, 37% polyamide mix that confusingly has both the terms “Superfine” and “Aran” in its name and knits up, like the Soft Merino, a bit bigger than DK on 4.5 or 5 mm needles.

The belt and collar are knitted separately and sewn on. The collar has a nice sort of crescent shape made with short rows. It is supposed to have double buttonholes to button up very high on the neck, but although I made the collar perfectly according to pattern and it fit fine on the jacket neck edge, the double buttonholes didn’t line up anywhere near each other. No worries — I don’t think any child would enjoy having something tightly buttoned around their neck, the collar stands up on its own anyway, and I didn’t even have to sew the buttonholes together, since the wool is so fluffy. Similarly, I saw no need to add a snap fastener to the neckline above the last button, as called for in the pattern, but I did add a snap fastener at the waist as indicated.

The hat is a simple modified beret, intended to be knit flat, but I made it in the round. The crown has a nice, easy decrease pattern: from 108 stitches, you k10, k2tog for 1 row (round), then 1 row straight, then k9, k2 tog, one row straight, then k8, k2tog and so on.

That’s it! I had a fun time knitting this set and was very glad to know someone to knit it for. I hope she likes it!