Patricia of Knitography Farm has wonderful online classes for traditional Norwegian knitting of socks, mittens, and sweaters. I've been taking her class on Norwegian Kofte sweaters, and I'm knitting the Gammel Sandvik sweater for K.
The Gammel Sandvik pattern is over 100 years old and is a traditional Norwegian sweater.
I've been learning so much about Norwegian knitting techniques. We've learned to knit Norwegian short rows to add length to the back neck of the sweater. This improves the fit of the sweater. We started with the neck ribbing and then added in stitches for the steek. The steek is made up of stitches that will be cut open later to turn the sweater into a cardigan.
I knit the XS/S, but I didn't realize the measurements were the finished sweater measurements, so I added in 2 inches to the body of the sweater when I split off the sleeves. This pattern is difficult to add width because the motif is so large, so I added 2 stitches into each motif, which added 12 stitches, or 2".
This sweater gives lots of practice in stranded knitting. The sweater motif has long stretches of one color, so I trapped the other color now and then. This always takes me longer to knit than motifs without long stretches of color.
I knit the sleeves using double pointed needles. Patricia said we could knit a "sleeve seam" under the sleeve by knitting the underarm stitch on one round, and then purling the underarm stitch on the next round, and repeating this pattern. I didn't do the underarm seam on this sweater. She said to start the sleeve seam about a 1/2" or inch after beginning the sleeve.
I'm really enjoying knitting this traditional Norwegian sweater. The buttonband will have a knitting on facing, which will hide the cut stitches. This will be an interesting technique. I love learning new historical techniques in knitting.
