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.

[MacKenzie]

Attempted? You did.

They look great!

[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.

[Pleater]

It looks as though the crosses start at the ankle with different colours - blue on the left ankle red on the right. Maybe one is just pulled up harder than the other.
I tend to make plain hose these days, but I know how much goes into making patterned ones.

It can become a bit of an obsession - I have numerous pairs around the house and at one time always had some socks being made. I probably have more pairs than I could ever wear out, but it is so good to be able to pull on a pair and feel the chill of the morning pushed back. We can't afford to have the heating on like we used to, so the woollies have to be deployed when the storms come sweeping in off the sea.

Anne the Pleater

[Tobus]

It looks as though the crosses start at the ankle with different colours - blue on the left ankle red on the right. Maybe one is just pulled up harder than the other.

As best I can tell, both of his socks have a red X on the front at the ankle and appear to be constructed the same. He appears to just have his right sock pulled up a bit higher than his left, leading to the cuffs not aligning the same. MacLeay seems to have captured this with attention to detail, rather than evening them out in his painting to make it look more tidy.

I opted to knit my cuffs with a hard fold point at the top and bottom (by switching to purl rows at the fold points) so I would avoid that problem. It does give my cuffs a slightly different appearance with more defined borders, but it made more sense to me to do it that way for pattern alignment.