As with most things in knitting, there’s more than one way to knit a sweater.
The most common method throughout the 20th century, and probably still today, is to knit individual pieces and seam them together. The benefits of this method are that you’re working on smaller pieces of knitting at a time and that – some advocates say – the seams of the finished garment help it keep its shape. The drawback to some is that it takes practice to sew a garment together well. And no matter how beautiful your knitting, a badly seamed sweater won’t look good.
A kids pullover knit from the top-down
Top-down sweater knitting is new to a lot of knitters, but it’s actually a centuries-old technique. You start at the neck, casting on all or some of the stitches for the neck opening, and increase toward the shoulders. The sleeve stitches are then separated from the body and held aside while you continue knitting down toward the waist, where you bind off. You re-attach yarn to the sleeves – one at a time – and work down toward the cuffs. To finish, you pick up stitches around the neck and knit the collar.
The key benefit of knitting a top-down sweater is that you can try it on as you go. And there’s only minimal finishing – weaving in your ends and sometimes seaming the underarms – at the end. The drawbacks – to some knitters – are that you’re working on a large piece of knitting and your sweater lacks the support of seams.
A top-down pullover I knit myself. This is the pattern we use in our Top-Down Pullover class. See the details below.
Top-down sweater knitting was first popularized in the 20th century by Barbara Walker in her amazing book Knitting from the Top. It’s one of my favorites and I highly recommend it.
More recently, Stefanie Japel
If you know how to knit in the round and you’ve knit a few hats or maybe a pair of socks, you have the skills you need to knit a top-down sweater. If you’d like to give it a try with our help, we have a class starting this month, where you’ll knit yourself a top-down sweater with worsted weight yarn. Come give it a try!
Top-down Pullover Class
$80 for four 2-hour sessions
prerequisites: knit and purl in the round
Mondays, 6 to 8pm, Jan 16, 23, Feb 6, and 13.
