Replicating Victorian-era kilt hose from MacLeay portrait

[Tobus]

Attempted? You did.

They look great!

Thanks! I wish I had some other views of his kilt hose; it was challenging to create a pattern from scratch based solely on what I can see there.

For starters, his left and right are differently adjusted. I based my pattern on his right leg, where the cuffs display the pattern evenly (with X's centered). And it appears that his rather beefy calves required a pretty severe amount of decreases down to his ankles. Obviously, my legs are not proportioned like that. But I attempted it anyway, starting with 4 diamonds around the calves, tapering to half, or two, diamonds at the ankles. I had to scale my pattern and adjust my knitting guage to make that happen, as well as strategically place the decreases at the back for the pattern to resolve nicely at the rear where it gets back to two diamonds.

Luckily, it turned out reasonably close to his!




But while the pattern looks correct from the front and sides, the back looks ... strange. You can see the X's on the sides converging, but the transition from 4 diamonds to 2 requires some odd intersections. But it kind of has to be this way for it to work.