#cardigan patterns

Amy Herzog’s Ultimate Sweater Book

Herzog subtitles this volume “The Essential Guide of Adventurous Knitters” for her idea is to give you a reference guide to take a pattern and alter it, or to move on to design your own patterns. So, she includes patterns as you can see from my photos, that is not the point of the book.

She begins with the basics on judging a fabric from a swatch, body measurements, and ease (the difference between your body measurements and the sweaters measurements). Then she runs through the basic construction types: drop-shoulder sleeves, raglan sleeves, yoke, and set-in sleeves, explaining how to calculate what to do with your stitches to shape your sweater. Then comes a section on adjustments to figure out how a basic template for a sweater can be made to fit well. Then she has some tips on edgings, pockets, and the like.

To give you courage, she then offers “recipes” that is versions of the basic sweaters she offered calculations for earlier with explanations on what she did to turn them into something more interesting, and then some sweater patterns laid out fully in case you are feeling a big overwhelmed by the design technicalities. The yellow cardigan and the grey henley in the photos are recipes, while the red tunic and the burgundy cardigan are full patterns. In total, there are 8 full patterns and 4 recipes, but also a pullover and cardigan for each of the 4 basic types. In short, a lot to learn from and work with whether you are simply curious about design and tweaking patterns, or have an idea in your head that you want to see reality.