March 1960: Spring Magic

Version 2 First project for March: this charming jacket from the jacket-and-skirt set titled “Spring Magic in Judy’s trim Outfit”. What a great title! And what a great photo in the booklet. I’m glad today’s girls don’t generally get their hair tortured into curls like litte Judy’s in the picture, but she certainly looks happy enough holding hands with her gigantic teddy bear.

The pattern calls for Patons Double Knitting at a gauge of 18 stitches to 4 inches over the stitch pattern. The child I knit this for can’t wear wool, though, so I made it in wonderful, easy-care, electric red and blue acrylic Bravo Originals from Schachenmayr. It did turn out to be a bit bulkier than Patons DK, so I adapted the stitch counts to reflect a gauge of 15 stitches to 4 inches. IMG_1566 (1)

The stitch pattern looks complicated but is actually very easy — fundamentally just k1, p1 on the right side and k on the wrong side, but the k stitches on the right side are made through the purl bump of the row below, giving a sort of check pattern without stranding or slip stitches. It has stockinette-stitch hems on the cuffs and bottom edge and a row of double crochet (British terminology, i.e. single crochet for Americans) around the front and collar edges.

It knit up so fast, and the colours were so bright, and the yarn so space-age, that I bought a whole lot more of it in order to make a 1960s-style, short-sleeved, A-line minidress for myself. I can’t wait!

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March 1960: Overview

March 1960 promises “Spring Magic” and a special pull-out supplement with designs in “Big Ben”, Patons’ new Aran-weight wool that promises to knit up especially quickly, so you can have your thick, warm woolies finished in time for the summer holidays. (Anyone who lives in Northern Europe or who has taken a holiday on the northern Atlantic or North Sea coast will understand perfectly.) Fine-gauge knitting is right out: the designs not written for Big Ben, like the excellent yellow pullover and sleeveless waistcoat for men, the “Young Style Designs” for teenage girls, or the fabulous checkered coat for a toddler, are all in DK-weight wool. The only exception is “John’s new pullover” in 4-ply.

The embroidery and homecraft projects focus on springtime and Easter, with a floral tablecloth and a cushion and chairback in traditional Hungarian design. It’s a pity nobody uses chairbacks these days, as they are a nice decoration and certainly prolong the life and cleanliness of a chair or sofa. The stitched rug is a “quick and easy modern design” and there are tapestry and needle-etching pictures of quaint-looking English town streets.

In comic land, Good Ted and Naughty Ted (two teddy bears) and their human friends Beth and Bill take a balloon ride to Magic Way, where a fairy turns Beth and Bill into animals in order for them to visit Noah’s Ark. As usual, the ads are for Lux soap, Opti-Lon zippers, Cow & Gate baby formula and various sewing and knitting machines.

One older style of ad is the Patons and Baldwin’s testimonial, in which a famous personage shows off their favorite hand-knit garment made from P&B wool. Here we have Russ Conway, the popular music pianist, at the peak of his career and wearing a lumber jacket in “man-weight wool”. Russ Conway was a multi-talented, self-taught piano player and composer who enjoyed enormous success, producing multiple No.1 hits and playing in a distinctive “honky-tonk” style. Though plagued by serious health conditions, he continued to compose, produce, and fund-raise for charity until his death in 2000 at the age of 75. You can read more about his life and career and hear some of his music on his tribute website .

I will be making two children’s designs: the fabulous checkered coat for a toddler, and “John’s new pullover” for a soon-to-be six-year-old.

February 1960: Overview

Feb1960_cover February 1960, the “Spring Knitting Number”, features an extra 16-page pull-out booklet with garments in Patons Rimple, a nubbly wool-with-a-bit-of-nylon yarn that looks like terrycloth toweling when worked up. The Ravelry yarn database has more information with pictures and modern projects. The wool itself gives so much texture that it would be pointless to knit intricate patterns or multi-colour pieces with it, so the “zippy designs” in the supplement are made on very classic lines: V-neck pullovers, a plain cardigan, a child’s cap and mittens.

The only slightly more ambitious design is this double-breasted A-line coat for a child. The model, like all children of the 1960’s and earlier, must have very cold legs. Why children of earlier times didn’t wear trousers or warm stockings or tights is a mystery that an older person will have to explain to me someday. It’s particularly strange to see in a knitting magazine, as often the child will be wearing a thick wool jumper or even a wool pullover under a wool sleeveless dress with a knitted wool coat over it, plus a hat and mittens if outside… but nothing on their poor bare legs.

The non-Rimple knitted garments are long, like this “Fashionable Dress” in 4-ply fingering at 7 stitches to the inch, or the long coat in a two-colour slip stitch pattern. Even the dolman cardigan is hip-length. The embroidery and needlepoint projects cover various traditional styles with a Victorian ribbon-band pattern for a stool top, a cushion with Tudor-inspired pears and acorns, and a very zig-zaggy “modern” Swedish rug and cushion set. The Swedish rug has a neat three-dimensional effect thanks to tufting.

As the focus of the issue is the Rimple supplement, the other projects in the issue are fairly basic: cardigans for men and boys, a crocheted cap and mitts, an embroidered wall panel and counted-stitch cushions. The ads are for fabric, knitting and sewing machines, and “Cow and Gate” baby formula — all standards — and the two teddy bears in the comic are heading off on Magic Way in their enchanted toy village.

Rimple is not my style, so I’ll be making a small project this month: the crocheted cap and mitts with an intriguing bobble pattern and plaited crown. Feb1960_2

January 1960: Green check jumper

greencheck_issuefoto2 My knitting project from this issue was a houndstooth-check jumper, made in double knitting wool in two shades of green. Large checked patterns of this type were popular this year, which is presumably why Stitchcraft categorized this jumper as “fashion knitting” rather than “casual knitting”.

I love the big green collar and the interplay of the two colours. What I didn’t like as much was the pattern itself. It looked fine in the photos but in a swatch, I found it looked too much like plusses or crosses and not like what I think of as houndstooth. Also, the straight vertical placement of the stitches made the fabric pucker. I experimented with a couple of other houndstooth variations and decided on the second one (lower swatch in photo.) greencheck_2swatches

My only other intended modifications were minimal: knitting it in the round with invisible fake “side seams” instead of in pieces with real seams, as I don’t like purling in two colours, and making the sleeves full-length instead of the 3/4 or 7/8 shown in the photos. However, once the body and upper back were finished, it looked as though the upper back would not be wide enough. I suppose the average Stitchcraft reader of 1960 was not particularly athletic, by modern standards… The shoulder width was fine, so the solution was to simply space the decreases from the beginning of the armhole farther apart (at each end of every 4th row instead of every other row). I did the same on the upper fronts and increased the total stitch count on the upper arms by 4 stitches, making the decreases more gradual on the sleeve caps as well.

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The pattern calls for Patons Double Quick Knitting. I got a good gauge (6 sts to an inch in pattern) and a fantastic colour match with Patons Diploma Gold DK, a wool-acrylic-nylon blend. I had plenty of it on hand from a frogged project, but the work in progress was nubbly. I thought it would get smooth again with blocking, but alas, the original project was probably blocked “too well” and the finished product is not quite smooth. Since it’s the same all over, though, I decided to think of it as a design feature.

The fit is excellent, everything worked out wonderfully and I am very satisfied with the final result.

January 1960: Overview

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January 1960 wishes us a Happy New Year with designs for “fashion” and “casual” knitting, a machine-knitted jumper, children’s and baby clothing to knit, a matching rug and cushion, and “something completely different in embroidery” — cushions and wall hangings with Victorian-era train, carriage and bicycle motifs. I find it strangely appropriate that Stitchcraft started a new and, one would expect, exciting decade with a look to an even more conservative past — the magazine was not exactly innovative, and its readership enjoyed patterns that give a nod to current styles without being all too forward-thinking.

The jumpers (or sweaters: Stitchcraft appears to use the two words interchangeably) continue the trend for somewhat thicker yarn — as Patience Horne writes in the introduction to this issue, “we all seem to get busier and busier these days” and the 9-stitches-to-an-inch creations of the 40s and 50s were slowly getting rarer. Five of the eight adult garments in this issue use double knitting yarn.

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On the embroidery front, there is a lovely design for a glass-topped coffee table, an adaptable Jacobean design in colour on the back cover, and a simple “leaf” cushion.

The Victorian cushions are “gay”, as are the children’s gloves. One of Stitchcraft‘s endearing qualities is its use of the word “gay” to mean charming, colourful, sprightly et. al. long after the word’s more modern meaning eclipsed its original one. It’s not yet quite so funny in 1960, but the word still appears in post-Stonewall issues up into the early 1970s. Yet another sign that Stitchcraft did not move with the times! I love all things gay no matter what sense of the word, so will be sure to point out this charming feature whenever it appears.

The ads feature Lux soap flakes, Wearwell facing ribbon and a Tru-Matic knitting machine — all repeat customers. There is always a little comic for the kiddies, and we’re already at part 3 of this one, “A Tale of Two Bears.”

I will be making the leaf cushion and the “green check jumper”, shown in colour on the inside back cover.