New Favorites: “Vintage” Fred Perry patterns

I wish I could tell you what the back story is on these, but alas, the video that purports to tell us “more about the traditional hand knits that inspired the collection” doesn’t really. Regardless of how or why they came to be, I’m smitten with this collection of knitting patterns from British sportswear brand Fred Perry — “inspired by traditional homespun knits of the 1950s.” I was initially sucked in by the design (as in graphic design) when I ran across one of the “cover” images on Pinterest, and assumed it was some random piece of ephemera. To my surprise, the link led to a whole set of brand new free knitting patterns, ready to download. I promptly tucked them all into my Evernote, but of course the aran cardigan is the one I’m dying to cast on.

UPDATE: Before I get everyone else as overexcited by these as I was, I want to point out Kate Davies’ post today on the subject. As I’ve noted in a comment on her post as well as below, I got a good laugh out of the fact that the cable sweaters are written out line by line, rather than charted — which inspired tomorrow’s blog post — and that made me wonder if (or how well) the patterns had been tech edited. Kate points out some other/bigger issues, most significant being the total lack of size info or grading.

UPDATE 10.22: And now, following a bit of web kerfuffle, the patterns have been pulled from the Fred Perry site altogether.

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ICYMI this week is a pair of sweaters I was obsessing over last fall, and still can’t get out of my mind: New Favorites: Bulky little layering sweaters.

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VERY IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT THE RHINEBECK SWEATER CONTEST

Although there have been some real beauties, sadly not a lot of sweaters have been entered in the #rhinebeck4fringe contest. (There was surprisingly little use of any Rhinebeck-related tags, actually.) I had concerns about my timing of the announcement, but I also have reason to believe that not every photo carrying the tag is actually showing up when I view the tag’s feed. So two things:

1) It’s possible people who were traveling are learning about the whole thing after the fact, so I’m going to give everyone through the end of Tuesday (Oct 22) to tag their photos. If you posted a picture of your Rhinebeck sweater to Instagram over the weekend and want to enter it in the contest, simply go back to your photo and add a comment containing the hashtag #rhinebeck4fringe. (You must tag your own photo, and it must be of a sweater you knitted/crocheted.)

2) To be 100% sure I see it, since Instagram is apparently not entirely reliable in this regard, leave a comment below (or on the original post, either one) saying explicitly that you have entered a sweater, and include your Instagram ID and/or the URL of the image.

Thanks to everyone who’s already entered — I’ll announce the winners later this week!

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