When my husband asked me to knit him a waistcoat, my first thought was ‘What would a Hobbit Wear?’
It needs to be warm, with movement in the fabric, and it needed to be ornamented.

When I was knitting this weskit, I thought of it having three overlapping sets of directions:
The shape
The texture
The designs
When knitting, what I was doing was to fill the shape with the texture, changing color according to the designs.

This pattern contains instructions or three lengths:
Short : 29 inches
Medium:30.5 inches
Long: 32 inches
I did design it to make it easy to add inches to the circumference and length without changing more than a stitch count, so it’s made to be made to fit!

The handsome bearded man in the photo is my husband, wearing my charcoal figure-it-out version, the one that evolved into this pattern.

I photoshopped the first two photos to show the weskit in two colors, as the pattern is written. The photo of my husband sitting down shows that I used two main colors.

The ‘Weskit’ pattern has proportional design spacing, uniformly even shaping, and fixes the little niggles I had while figuring out.

I also added swatch-pocket instructions, and am working on swatches showcasing Verdant Gryphon colors. When I have finished a couple of those I will finish the full versions, since my husband really, really likes his weskit.

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In the first pocket swatch you can see the bottom three patterns of the weskit pattern. The green is ‘Barbary coast’, the blue is ‘Bootheel’, and the burnt orange is ‘Marrakesh’. I chose those colors because they reminded me of shire-in-my-head landscapes. When I grabbed my paperback ‘Hobbit’ to check if a paperback would fit in a pocket of this size, I was amazed at the similarity with the cover color scheme!

The set of three pocket swatches shows the designs in ‘Panjin Red Beach’ (the red) and a mystery green. I do think that ‘Mekong River’ could work in its place.

I think the Verdant Gryphon colors that would give the same effect as the 2-color charcoal weskit would be ‘Tulum’ for a deep grey or ‘Davy Jones’ Locker’ if you want black, and
’St. Petersburg’ for a blue-green contrast color, ‘Rotterdam’ for a violet, burgundy and green, or ‘Mosquito Coast’ for light and dark gold, teal and burgundy.