Norwegian Knitting

Last night I put the finishing touches on the matching sweaters that I have been making for my little niece and nephew for one of their Christmas presents. (I still had to get them a toy. What kid wants a sweater for Christmas?) I really needed to finish them up so that I could get all my family's gifts wrapped.

This was a fun project. I haven't had the time to do much machine knitting in the last few months, and so it was good to get in the workroom and get back into it.

Now I know a lot of handknitters think that this is cheating, but it's just another way of creating something out of fiber. While the actual knitting process is much faster with machine knitting, there is lots of planning that takes place long before you ever start making the sweater pieces. This is a Dale of Norway pattern called Sirdal. The Dale patterns are great for converting to machine knitting because they have very good graphs, and they also provide the schematics for their patterns. Just like in handknitting, the whole process starts with a swatch. Once I've entered the graphed patterns into the machine and selected my yarn, I knit a rather large swatch. I include every pattern--to test if they are correct--and I also make sure that I knit quite a bit of the main pattern. The main pattern in this case is the flecked design that is between the hem and the yoke patterns. Once I have the swatch knitted and blocked, I need to decide which gauge to enter into the machine, since the gauge in the main pattern is going to be slightly different than the gauge of the more dense patterns such as the one at the yoke of this sweater. The way I figure this out is to enter the dimensions for the shape of each piece into the machine and then adjust the gauge numbers to get the correct number of stitches and rows for that size. So unlike handknitting where it's important to adjust your knitting to the gauge of the pattern, with machine knitting it's important to adjust your pattern to the gauge of the knitting.

The next step is to measure out the length of each of the different patterns in the sweater. Then I add in the measurement for the hem--either a ribbed hem or in this case, just a folded hem. Once I have that measurement, I calculate how many rows of the main pattern that I will have to knit to get the length I need for each finished piece. Throughout this process, I keep detailed notes for every project so that when I get to the actual knitting, I am able to relax and just follow my own instructions--sometimes having to tweak a few things that sounded great in theory, but didn't work out so well in practice. The notes have also come in handy later on if I ever want to make the item again. Why reinvent the wheel every time?

Once the pieces are knit, most of the assembly can also be done on the machine. The only hand work on these two sweaters, after blocking, was to take care of several yarn ends, sew up the underarm and side seams, and apply the trim and buttons on the cardigan.

I'm really pleased with the way they both turned out, and am already thinking about something I'd like to make myself as a mid-winter project. Hope the kids like them.