Work for Idle Hands

I knitted the smallest size for Dotty and it came out easily to fit George for whom a 42 inch chest would be normal. I noticed that it knitted up to a larger gauge than quoted, although normally my tension is standard according to the needle gauge and wool thickness. This is a Fair Isle technique, though, and typically this comes out tighter than straight knitting, for which I try and compensate by knitting loosely (as in "strand the threads loosely across the back"); it may be that Rowan accounted for tight knitting in the tension quoted.
The original is in rather nice shades of brown, but when the right Felted Tweed colour finally arrived in John Lewis, they had sold out of the recommended Tapestry colour. As the birthday was fast approaching, I went ahead with it in two shades of blue instead and it has worked out quite well.
I think this project would also work out well in black and grey.

A word on the wool quantities:

The pattern calls for 4 balls in each of the two main colours, and I used only 3 balls of the Tapestry for the size I knitted - by a long way - and took one back.
Worse, (on the budget), the pattern also calls for 2 further balls of two different contrasting colours. The first is used only to cast on the stitches (!). The second to do the first two rows of the welt. They are also used to finish off the neck and sleeve bands in the same way. You could miss the rows out altogether, and knit the welts plain but I am against this; I think these little touches really add to the design (as Kaffe knows best, I'm sure). However I am very mean about these things - this tiny detail adds on up to 30% to the cost. So I would urge anyone to try and find a substitute among their wool oddments - you don't need much. I think I would have found it hard to find the browns but for my colour scheme I would have had to choose my own colours anyway; for the cast on row I used a completely plain black double knitting wool (Patrons Clansman pure wool), and for the second contrast, I was lucky that I had some pale grey Rowan Felted Tweed left over from another project.

A word on the Tapestry wool:

You may need to be warned that the pattern that you achieve in the Tapestry wool depends on the number of stitches in the row, rather like the self-patterning sock wools. This is easily visible in the photos of the items in Rowan book 40 (see, for example, "Serge" in the web link given above). With Dotty, you get different patterns in the spots as you decrease for the neck, and, consequently also the patterning is asymmetric on each side of the neck.
I did not like this for Dotty (although, it is nice in some of the patterns) so I went to tedious lengths to avoid it. I knitted across both sides of the neck together (both on the needles at the same time, using separate balls of wool for the background), and I kept breaking the Tapestry wool at the V neck edge, and sewed in these ends once I had finished. This meant the dyed pattern on the wool progressed evenly up each side of the neck. I preferred this outcome, but I can also see that some people (Kaffe?) may prefer the asymmetric design.