Hello! Do you know that feeling? You’d like to be a little more creative in your knitting but don’t quite know how to go about it. Creativity is all good and fine, but you also want to end up with something that fits and looks good. I sometimes have spurts of creativity, designing my own patterns from scratch, but I also love to just follow an existing pattern. This time I’ve found a middle way between the two. Let me tell you about it.
Last year I knit a pullover for our grandson – the Vinterkonglegenser from the Klømpelømpe Four Seasons book.
It was a great success. The yarn is soft, the pullover fits well and our grandson loves wearing it. Now he’s almost grown out of it. So, I thought I’d knit another one exactly like it, from the same yarn, only a size up and in different colours. But then I thought, no, I want something a little more different – I’ll use different motifs in the yoke.
While I was adding a few rows to my Selbu mittens, I had the idea of using motifs from the same booklet the mittens are in:
The booklet is in Norwegian, but even if you can’t read Norwegian it’s a great source of inspiration. It contains a large number of charts that can be read by anyone, no matter what language they speak. If you’d like to get an idea of what’s inside, it can be found here on Ravelry, and you can leaf through part of it here. Not nearly everything in it is shown there, though.
Many (or perhaps all?) of the items in this booklet are replicas from the collection of the museum in Selbu.
Similar motifs can be found here. For our grandson, I chose the traditional snøkrystall (snow crystal) motif, and combined it with some smaller diamonds and triangles. I also used the tiny triangles along the sleeve and body ribbings:
Inserting your own yoke design into an existing pullover pattern is a fun thing to do. It’s a bit like doing a sudoku, puzzling with stitch numbers. You can use software, but ordinary graph paper and coloured pencils will do fine, too. You could follow these 3 steps:
- Copy the outline of the yoke chart from the pattern you’re using (same number of stitches and rows, but empty squares).
- Indicate where the increases (top-down pullover) or decreases (bottom-up pullover) are placed in the pattern.
- Now it’s time to play with motifs! What main motif would you like to use? Will it fit? Where? How could you fill up the rest of the space? (Keep in mind that the increases/decreases will distort the stitches to some extent. It’s best to have the increases/decreases in solid coloured rows or areas.)
I first designed my yoke on the computer (using Stitch Mastery), and then made quite a few changes while I was knitting it. Here is my messy design:
And here is the original yoke (left) next to my design (right). Apart from the yoke, I just followed the pattern – same pattern, different pullover:
The yarn shop where I got the yarn for both of the pullovers (Sandnes Tynn Merinoull) had an advent calendar in its window following the same principle – same pattern, 24 different pullovers. It’s a terrible photo with the opposite side of the street reflected in the glass, but I thought it fun enough to add here:
Why not give the same-pattern-different-pullover-approach a try, too? The possibilities are endless.
Wat een mooie trui! Echt prachtig gedaan.
Marijke, you always inspire me in my knitting and observation of nature. Thank you❤️