Replicating Victorian-era kilt hose from MacLeay portrait

[Tobus]

This is the first of several pairs of kilt hose that I hope to replicate from the famous MacLeay portraits of Highlanders, commissioned by Queen Victoria and published in 1870.

The subject is John MacNaughton, shown at right. I found the following notes online: "The addenda notes to the 1874 edition of The Highlanders names the second sitter as John McNaghton and states that he was supposed to have been robbed and murdered in Glasgow in 1868, and his body found four months later in the Clyde."



I attempted to recreate his unique kilt hose, scaled for my legs. Due to the complications with trying to knit diagonal stripes in two separate colours with blank fields of grey, I opted to knit the socks first in plain grey and add the stripes via a knitting embroidery technique called duplicate stitching.