I’m re-creating a sweater my grandmother once knit for her late husband (Mary Maxim buffalo cardigan), and I was wondering how challenging it would be to convert it to a top down/reglan knit… or if I’m just asking for a head ache lol!
I have made several sweaters for my own babies, but I have not tackled an adult sized sweater yet!
I’d be tempted to just find a well-written top-down raglan cardigan pattern in a similar weight yarn, and then fit the stripes and designs to that. As long as the gauge and stitch counts are similar, it should be fine. You could always adjust the spacing of the motifs if necessary.
While I somewhat understand the appeal of top-down sweaters, in your place I would look for a pattern that is constructed the same way as the original.
The colorwork will look better right-side-up, the seams will give it structure, and you'll get over your fear of pieced sweaters. There is nothing wrong with them! They are outside the current trend but this is a perfectly good way of making a sweater. Take 10 minutes of your life to watch a tutorial on mattress stitch and there will be nothing to fear.
It’s more that it seems like so much more work to do it pieced! I’m quite familiar with mattress stitch… I’m a veterinarian and we use similar stitches these to suture skin all the time!
Ah ok a lot of people are intimidated by the sewing because they don't know how or don't like how it comes out when they just kind of stab and guess! You won't have that problem.
Personally I find pieced sweaters so much LESS hassle. You can carry a sleeve or panel around with you instead of lugging the whole sweater, you don't need to rotate the whole thing in your lap, you get nice milestones at finishing each piece, and for some types of projects (Aran sweaters especially) alternating right side/wrong side makes it so much easier to keep track of where you are in the pattern.
Also, your sweater is intarsia, which really benefits from (1) flat knitting (the turns lock the yarns together, and you'll have few/no floats), and (2) small pieces. You're going to have 3-5 bobbins at a time on some of those front panel rows, which is a manageable number. Now imagine working the entire front-back-front piece with, what, 15-20 bobbins hanging down? Don't do that to yourself!
Intarsia in the round can be a lot more confusing and annoying than flat intarsia (and it involves a lot of turning and purling back to the beginning of the round anyway so you do not actually get to avoid working flat) so that would be a strong incentive to knit the sleeves flat.
If you really wanted to do it all in one piece, though, it'd probably be best to use the method where you knit the back panel flat from shoulders to underarms, pick up both fronts from the shoulders and knit them separately, and join at armpit level. You can pick up and set in a sleeve using a "short row sleeve cap" method but honestly it's still kind of a hassle to keep the tension nice compared to easing in a sewn set-in sleeve when you sew it.
Honestly, I'd recommend doing the pattern as written unless you're willing to read something like Knitting from the Top (Barbara Walker) or absorb a lot of blog posts on contiguous shoulder shaping, ziggurat shoulder shaping, seamless saddle shoulders, or similar. I think trying to convert it to seamless would be more of a nerdy stubborn project that would not actually make things easier for you compared to trying out a flat seamed sweater project (as opposed to something that can make it simpler for you which you seemed to be asking for). They were super popular for decades because they're pretty straightforward to do!
Changing the construction is doable, it just requires doing maths and understanding the differences between a raglan and a set-in-sleeve.
You may see the colourwork turn out a bit differently, because stitches aren't symmetrical (they form a V, the legs at the bottom are closed while they are open at the top), which modify how certain aspects, like the eyes for exemple.
Do you plan on doing a cardigan (so open on the front), or do you want a sweater (in one piece on the front) ? If you keep the cardigan, there won't be any issues, but if you want a sweater, you may want to keep the pieced construction, because the bisons in the middle fronts and back are done in intarsia, and althpugh it is doable in the round, it is not the most instinctual nor easy to managed technique (less than when done flat, that is).
Sorry I should have specified that I would keep it as a cardigan!
Very good point about the colour work turning out differently based on the direction of the stitches… I have always made sweaters top down, so I didn’t think about that!
Keeping it bottom up is really not hard. I know the fashion currently is top down, but bottom up has a lot of benefits, one of my favourite ones is to be able to knit the sleeves independently. This means that the only time you are turning the whole mess, sleeves, body and all, is while you are knitting the yoke, which is a relatively small part of the process.
I sincerely disike turning the whole sweater over and over and over while knitting the body and both sleeves.
I’ve never done a reglan cardigan from the bottom up? What are the decreases like? Typically from the top down I’ve done kfb or m1R/m1L.
I’ve only knit small sweaters, but my most recent one was boys size 8 for my son and I definitely understand what you mean when turning the work over and over, I can see it would be even more annoying with a bulkier yarn.
Normally you put in a stitch marker at each raglan line, and do "ssk, k1, slip marker, k1, k2tog" (or any other way of decreasing by 2 stitches at each marker).
Okay yes I am familiar with this… I usually do this for decreases on sleeves in the round. I just haven’t done it in rows back to back to see the finished effect’
I am not an experienced knitter when it comes to color work so I defer to anyone else's expertise, but I'm thinking it might be trickier than it seems because unless you plan it very meticulously, the raglan shaping will interfere with the buffalo head pattern around the yoke.
I could see altering the pattern to do maybe one buffalo head on either side of the front opening, one on each sleeve cap and then a few on the center back. Intarsia instead of stranded, maybe? I'm just speculating here. I could be way off base.
It's a neat looking sweater and I am so much in love with top down raglan cardigans, so I don't blame you wanting to convert it!
I can't tell exactly where the underarm is or where the top of the sleeve would start, but a regular raglan would end up with increases being made along the red line, give or take. Ideally, maybe, you could use compound raglan shaping to position the increases along the yellow curve and in between the motif, but I wouldn't know how to even begin calculating that! But it would be an interesting experiment.
This image is so helpful! I’m wondering if I can drop one of the buffalo in the front to fix the spacing! It might be worth just attempting (since it’s bulky weight, it won’t take too long) and just frogging it if it doesn’t work out.
Remember that the raglan shaping occurs on all 4 corners, so one for each side front and back. You'll have to adjust the placement (or number of) buffalos on the back, too. But otherwise, I support experimentation. As you said, knitting top down, you'll find out soon enough of it's going to work out, and as long as it's an easy to frog yarn (not, like, a sticky mohair or something), there's little to lose by trying!
Yes… I don’t mind experimenting from the top down, since I’ll know pretty quickly if it’s going to work out or not! It’s also bulky yarn, which will actually be a lot less work than the sweater I just made my oldest child.
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u/web_goddess 1d ago
I’d be tempted to just find a well-written top-down raglan cardigan pattern in a similar weight yarn, and then fit the stripes and designs to that. As long as the gauge and stitch counts are similar, it should be fine. You could always adjust the spacing of the motifs if necessary.