This is a vintage knitting pattern booklet — Patons & Baldwins Booklet 8020, published in 1972 — and the design it presents is called “Darling duet”: a baby dress with a patterned yoke and delicate picot edges, paired with a matching little coat. It is not a story or an argument but a set of working instructions, and it reads the way pattern leaflets of the period did, moving from yarn choice and equipment through row-by-row directions to the final pressing and sewing up.
“Use the recommended yarn it makes sense.”
The Core Argument
The booklet’s real subject is choice within limits. Patons stocked many yarns, and the opening pages make the point that different yarns give different effects, so the knitter must decide before buying which of three declared-suitable yarns the garment will be made in. Each behaves differently. Patons Baby Quickerknit Courtelle is the softest, bounciest Courtelle, exceptionally washable provided the knitter follows three rules: knit firmly, cold rinse, and never iron — colours then stay fresh wash after wash. Patons Baby Quickerknit Pure Wool is the softest, gentlest botany wool, grown on specially bred Merino sheep and shrink-resist. Patons Baby Colourglow Quickerknit offers a new look in baby knitting with soft dapple colours, machine-washable as a Courtelle and nylon blend. The booklet urges buying the full quantity at once, so that dye-lot variations never spoil the finished piece.
Inside the Book
Yarn, Tension, and Equipment
Both the dress and the coat are sized to fit a chest of eighteen to nineteen inches. The pattern leaves the length from the top of the shoulders, the sleeve seam, and the ball quantities for each of the three yarns to be filled in by the reader. The equipment list is precise: two No. 12 and two No. 10 needles plus spares, BEEHIVE or MILWARD DISC needles measured by the BEEHIVE gauge, two stitch-holders, four small buttons and one press stud for the dress, and one small button for the coat. Tension is tested by casting on fourteen stitches on No. 10 needles, working eighteen rows in stocking stitch, and casting off; lightly pressed, the square should measure two inches each way. A glossary defines the abbreviations — K., P., st., sl. 1, y.fwd., p.s.s.o., tog., inc., dec., beg., alt., rep., patt., in. — that carry the rest of the booklet.
The Dress
The front is worked by the two-needle method. On No. 12 needles, cast on 103 stitches and work four rows of stocking stitch; change to No. 10 needles and work a picot row of knit one, then yarn forward and knit two together repeated to the end. Five stocking-stitch rows follow, then a hem is made by knitting together one stitch from the needle with one loop from the cast-on edge all across. The lace-like pattern occupies twenty-eight rows, repeated once more and then partly again, before the raglans are shaped by casting off two stitches at the start of the next two rows and decreasing one stitch at each end of the next four, leaving 91 stitches on a spare needle.
The back is worked as the front to the marked point, then divided for the back opening: knit 53, turn, and leave the remaining stitches aside. The first side continues in alternating rows with slip-stitch decreases and yarn forwards, and the tenth row carries the first buttonhole. Raglans are shaped to 47 stitches, which go onto a stitch-holder. The yarn is rejoined to the spare stitches, three stitches are cast on for an underflap, and the second side is worked to correspond with the first, reversing the shapings and omitting the buttonhole.
Sleeves begin on No. 12 needles with 35 stitches and five rows of garter stitch, increase to 53 stitches, then change to No. 10 needles and work the thirteenth to twenty-second pattern rows. After raglan shaping, 41 stitches slip onto a spare needle. For the yoke, all pieces are gathered onto two No. 10 needles with the wrong side facing, in the order of right back, first sleeve, front, second sleeve, left back — 267 stitches. Working across them, the first row reduces to 173, the seventh to 153, and successive decrease rows bring the count down through 139, 125, 111, and 85. The second, third, and fourth buttonholes fall at the fifth, fifteenth, and twenty-seventh rows. On No. 12 needles the twenty-ninth row reduces to 69 stitches; three stocking-stitch rows follow and the work is cast off.
Making up means blocking each piece by pinning out the round edges and pressing lightly — a cool iron and dry cloth for the Courtelle and Colourglow yarns, a warm iron and damp cloth for wool. The small raglan seams, side seams, and sleeve seams are joined, the underflap stitched in position, and the neckband folded at its row of holes to the wrong side and slip-hemmed. Buttons and the press stud go on last.
The Coat
The coat’s back is worked as the dress front to the marked point, then continued in stocking stitch until it measures five and a half inches. Raglans are shaped as before, leaving 91 stitches on a spare needle. The right front begins on No. 12 needles with 51 stitches, four rows of stocking stitch, and the same picot treatment, then continues in stocking stitch to match the back, ending with 45 stitches on a stitch-holder; the left front reverses the shapings. Sleeves start with 35 stitches and seventeen rows of garter stitch, increase to 53, and continue in stocking stitch until the sleeve seam measures five and a half inches, finishing with 41 stitches after raglan shaping.
The yoke gathers left front, first sleeve, back, second sleeve, and right front — 263 stitches — and works rows one through thirty-three, reducing progressively from 263 to 169, 149, 135, 121, 107, 81, and finally 65 stitches, with the change to No. 12 needles at row 29 and a row of holes at row 33. After three stocking-stitch rows the work is cast off. Making up follows the dress, with the neckband folded and hemmed at the row of holes.
The finishing touch is the borders. On No. 12 needles, 67 stitches are knitted up along the right front edge from the lower edge to the neck, and rows one through seven are worked with a buttonhole in the second row — knit to the last five stitches, knit two together, yarn forward, knit three — repeated in the sixth row. The left border is knitted up from the neck edge and matched to the right, omitting the buttonhole. Both borders are folded at their row of holes to the wrong side and slip-stitched loosely, the double buttonholes oversewn together, the seams pressed, and the button sewn on.
The Publisher’s Note
The booklet closes with a practical footnote: knitting enquiries should be addressed to Sarah Bell at Patons & Baldwins Limited in Alloa, Scotland, and the prices quoted apply only in Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Themes
What holds this small booklet together is the discipline of gauge and the patience of sequence. Every instruction assumes that a knitter will test tension first, buy all the yarn at once, and trust the row counts; the garment only appears if the numbers are respected in order. The picot edging and the patterned yoke carry the decorative weight, while the plain stocking stitch and garter stitch do the structural work. There is also a quiet mid-century domestic ethic running through it — the concern for washability, the careful rules about rinsing and ironing, the shrink-resist wool, the machine-washable blend — a recognition that baby clothes are worn hard and washed often. And the pattern’s insistence on choosing the yarn before casting on makes the booklet, in its modest way, a lesson in committing to materials.
Why It Matters
Pattern leaflets like this one are fragile, ephemeral things, and most were used to pieces. What survives is a precise record of how ordinary garments were made in the early 1970s: the needle gauges, the yarn names, the buttonhole placements, the pressing instructions. For anyone knitting the design today, the booklet is still entirely usable, provided the yarns are matched by tension rather than by name. For everyone else, it is a small, exact artifact of domestic craft — the kind of document that shows how much skill hides inside a plain instruction to knit two together and pass the slipped stitch over.
