Ethnic Knitting Discovery is here!

Welcome!  Today is my day to host Donna Druchunas’ blog book tour for her newly-released book, “Ethnic Knitting Discovery.”

I’ve begun designing a Norwegian sweater based on the techniques in the book, and will talk a bit about how I made some of the design decisions.

First off, if you haven’t yet seen the book, it’s basically a guide to designing your own sweaters in the traditions of the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and the Andes.  If you’ve ever wanted to take the leap to designing your own sweaters, this just might be the inspiration you were waiting for.  She lays out the entire process in detail, and even includes worksheets to help you do the calculations.

This project will be a Norwegian cardigan for myself.   As Donna discusses in the book, traditional Norwegian designs include two-color patterning worked in the round, with steeks used for the armholes (and in this case, the front of the cardigan too).  So my first decision was color-related.
 

The first thing you’ll notice is that I have not used traditional colors for a Norwegian sweater.  I’ve had this green and black color combo on my brain for months now and decided that I’d do a  semi-traditional interpretation of a Norwegian sweater.   This yarn is worsted weight, only because that’s what I happened to have.  When I actually make the sweater, I’ll likely switch to a lighter weight yarn because the double stranding would make the cardigan too heavy in worsted weight.

I chose a random motif and did a gauge swatch.  Note that I did the gauge swatch in the round, because the sweater will be knit in the round.  That’s important because your gauge can vary significantly between flat knitting and in-the-round knitting.  My stranded gauge with this yarn came out to 5 sts and 7 rows per inch.

To start the design planning process, I first drew a schematic of the basic dimensions of my drop shoulder sweater.  

This allows me to calculate how many stitches I’ll have to work with.  For a circumference of 44″ at 5 sts per inch, I’ll need to cast on roughly 220 stitches.  That would give the back 110 stitches, and each half of the cardigan front would have 55 stitches.  So I’d need to select motifs that could fit evenly into 55 sts.

This schematic also tells me that I’ll have approximately 9.7″ for the main motifs if I start them at the point where the underarm begins.  With my gauge of 7 rows per inch, that means I can plan for about (7 x 9.7=) 67 rows of motifs.

Choosing motifs:  I browsed my stitch and motif dictionaries for possibilities that could fit evenly into my 55 sts,  knowing that I’d have to do some fiddling with some of them to get them to fit.   Donna provides a many charted motifs in her book, and I also used some from a book that I’ve had in my library for years (1000 Great Knitting Motifs).   I’ve always wanted to use this reindeer, so it became my focal point motif.  The others would go above and below it.  Here are a few of my preliminary sketches where I was working out how to put the motifs together:

I swatched a few options and then played around with how to arrange them together in a pleasing way, taking into account the proportions of each one in relation to the others.  This can be done almost as easily on graph paper with colored pencils if you don’t have charting software.  And it’s fun — I always feel like I’m back in elementary school when I draw with my pencils and graph paper.

It’s easiest to fit the largest motif in first, and then work the smaller ones in around it once you’ve determined your final stitch count.  So I adjusted the stitch counts on the edges of the reindeer so it would have 18 sts in each repeat, and adjusted the stitch count of the front panels to 54 (instead of 55), thus allowing me to fit 3 reindeer on each side of the front center, and 6 across the back.  So my adjusted stitch count was now (54×4=) 216 instead of 220.  Next I made sure that the smaller motifs could fit on the 54-stitch panels. 

I then worked another swatch in the round with several motifs stacked together, just to make sure I’d like the proportions once they were knitted.  (Don’t mind my uneven tension on this swatch — I was knitting on the plane on the way home from Stitches and my stranding was too tight because I was stressed by crying babies.  Just pretend you don’t notice, ok?) 

The bottom 1×1 stripes will be the trim at the bottom of the sweater, and the lice pattern will fill the rest of the body up to where the upper motifs begin (at the armhole). 

Once I’d settled on an arrangement I liked and figured out how to make it fit, I used my charting software to create a chart.  If you’re working with graph paper and pencils, it’s easy to cut each motif into a strip and move them around in different arrangements to come up with your final choices.  Here’s my chart at this point:

This chart is 54 sts wide by 66 rows tall, a perfect fit for the front halves of my cardigan.  But notice that one of the motifs has some extra space at the right edge.  That one is a 10-stitch repeat, which leaves only 4 sts, not enough for another full repeat.  So I decide to move it over 2 sts to the right, centering it on the panel, just as I did for the reindeer motifs above. 

See, isn’t that better? And if I wanted to I could keep fiddling with it more, either adding/subtracting stitches to motifs, or adding/subtracting sts to the chart (and therefore the size of the sweater). When you’re designing for yourself, it’s totally up to you how you arrange the elements and what size you make the sweater. I think the hardest part of this is really just narrowing down your choices and picking your final designs. It’s really lots of fun!

Obviously this isn’t a completed design yet — I still need to work out the sleeve design.  I also need to make sure my reindeer motif won’t be messed up by the neckline shaping.  If so, I’ll fiddle with the layout some more until I’m satisfied.  Then all I have to do is cast on!

I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to writing this pattern up and publishing it (I have such a backlog of designs waiting to be published!), but if you’re interested in this process, make sure you grab a copy of Ethnic Knitting Discovery for your library.  It’s empowering, which is a good thing.

Explore posts in the same categories: Designing