Re-Creating A Vintage Cardigan

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Some time last year, I bought a charming hand-knit cardigan at an estate sale.




It had a lot of interesting features that I wanted to explore.  I thought it might be a fun challenge to see if I could reproduce the sweater, without the benefit of a written pattern.




I've got the back panel almost finished.  I'll be putting this on stitch holders until I knit the two fronts and the two sleeves.  The sleeves are going to be a challenge, because I really don't understand what the original knitter was thinking.  Her method of working is a bit of a mystery to me. 

So far, this has been a fast, fun project.  I hope I don't get bogged down and abandon this sweater when it is 95% completed.  That's what happens to me, far too often.  I start a really ambitious project, and then get utterly stuck at the end.  Sigh....  I can't do anything the easy way, can I?

Comments

Noreen said…
Very sweet. My guess is that the sweater is knit from the top down. Those look like lines of symmetrical increases in the yoke. You would get to the full number of stitches, do the garter ridges, and then divide for the other sections. Putting the arms on a holder/yarn string while you work the body of the sweater back and forth flat. The arms could be knit in the round. Just a guess, though. If you kept the stitches live in each section knit from the bottom, I think you could probably figure a neat way to join a top down yoke to a hem-up sweater.
Lisa said…
My knitting group and I really poured over it, and concluded that the sweater was knit from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. The shaping seems to be decreases rather than increases. And the neck looks like a bind-off rather than a cast-on edge.
Anonymous said…
Years ago I knit this sweater from the neck down. Seemed everyone was doing this sweater at the time.
Lisa said…
Anonymous -- WHO ARE YOU?????
Anonymous said…
I knit a sweater with a yoke like this once before. As i recall. I knit each of the front, back and sleeves up to theyoke, then put them all on a circular needle and knit the yoke up from there.

Check Ravelry.com. That's an excellent source for knitting advice.
Noreen said…
Avanti, by Eileen Vito, available on Rav, is a similar construction. A yoked cardigan, worked from the bottom up--if that's what's going on in this one. But I'm curious about your first anonymous who says she knit it, from the neck down. (I'll send your link to another 50 years plus knitter and see if she recognizes this. I searched on Rav for adult women's cardigans with yokes--no luck.)

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