There are many of these. I confess that much of what I have told you has been a simplification of the truth, but doing this website has taken me days, and I have to draw the line somewhere. The exact pattern of shirt A2 would take me absolutely ages to describe, and I have formed the opinion that much of it is unnecessary to know. There are many asymmetries in the shirt, which I suspect came about when the makers linking the various parts of the shirt together realised that they had gone wrong, so they fudged a few extra rows or contractions here and there to get things back in line.
For the moment, I'm just going to mention two things: one alteration to the pattern I started with, and the addition of knot contractions.
The pattern I showed you on the garment pattern page showed a contraction of four on the centre of the chest, bringing the shirt in for the waist. The actual shirt has two parallel pairs of contractions. On one row, a single link separates two contractions, and five normal rows are below that, then there is a second pair of contractions. The overall effect is that the shirt still contracts by four columns, but this happens in two bigger stages, rather than four lesser ones.
The second thing is a bit more complicated. There are knot contractions down the sides of shirt A2. These are not used in the armpit, perhaps for comfort. On the lower sides, though, comfort is little effected by the choice of against-the-grain contraction, and so the knot type has been preferred, as it is a bit stronger. A2 is not symmetrical in this regard, but my shirt is. I'll show you my shirt.
 |
| Here we see a mid-shot of the back of my shirt. The knot contractions are on the lower side. In the hope that this might help, I have marked the knot contractions with pink circles in this miniature version of the picture on the right. Also in this miniature, I have picked out one visible line of expansions in the back with a pink line. With a green line, I have shown the edge of what you might mistake for some hiatus or line of contractions. In fact this is just the edge of an area where the links are hanging slack, and so this detail is of no consequence. |
 |
These knot contractions have the effect of making the front of the shirt shorter than the back. Shirt A2 has these. My guess is that the reason for them is to make the bottom edge of the shirt hang straight. A chap's backside tends to stick out a bit, so the mail at the back has to take a longer route towards the ground. Without these knot contractions, the side-view of the garment when worn would show that the bottom edge rose up towards the back. The shirt A2 has the knot contractions one above the other, but I decided to stagger them on the diagonal. I did this, thinking that this would create less of a kink in the line of latten rings around the bottom of the shirt. You can in the above photograph see a slight kink even so, and I'm not sure that my idea was a good one.
MAIL ARMOUR MAKING