THE Mary Maxim Thread

  • Thread starter Thread starter lindapoirier
  • Start date Start date
I fixed my sweater... I know maybe frowned upon?!
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I would call it "restoration" and not frown a bit. You did not alter the original design, you did your best to recreate it. And you didn't destroy anything in the process.
 
lindapoirier said:
What was interesting, at least to me, was the arrow strings and bow strings where not part of the knit. A detail to highlight the sweater?? I fixed my sweater...
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That's interesting to me too! I'm a keen knitter.

Embroidery over knitting has a long history. There's a technique is called Swiss Darning, also known as duplicate stitch, where you sew wool over knitted stitches, creating stitches that are the same shape as the knit stitches. It's fairly common technique in colour knitting, when you want a detail of a few stitches, that would be fiddly to produce in stranded or intarsia colour knitting. Sometimes a whole design is created in duplicate stitch over a plain sweater, and sometimes it's used for a small detail over a colour design.

I think yours isn't exactly duplicate stitch, because the angle of the over stitches is different to the angle of the knitted stitches, but it's similar.

I have a 1940s Scandinavian knitting book, that has traditional designs created entirely in duplicate stitch, after the sweater is knitted. It has other embroidery techniques too.

You did a great job!
 
lindapoirier said:
Ruth, that is so fascinating. I recently joined instagram and when I searched 40s sweaters I was inundated with "Bavarian" or embroidered sweaters. Is the sweater below an example of what you mean? Or is it simply embroidery on wool?
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That's a gorgeous sweater! for some reason I can't see the image now from my laptop, though I could see it on my phone. To me that looks like some other kind of embroidery, not Swiss Darning.

I'll show you some illustrations from my 1940s book. It was originally published in Danish, but I have an English translation. You can just about see on the close up, how it looks like knit stitches. On the full garment, only the thin stripes at the hem cuffs and pockets are knitted in, everything else is Swiss Darning.

Instructions on Swiss darning
Swiss darning 1.jpeg


Close up
Swiss darning 1 1.jpeg


Full garment
Swiss darning 1 2.jpeg
 
Here's some more examples of Swiss Darning, as well as decoration, it's also used for repair.

This is a decorative example, the yellow and white motif being entirely worked on top of the plain knit, in Swiss darning. Photo credit Karen Barbe
SwissDarning3.jpg


Here it's being used to cover a thin patch - the contrast colour shows the work, but in the same colour this would be a near invisible repair
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And here it's being used to repair a hole - first the long vertical threads are added, then Swiss Darning recreates the knit stitches -
another near invisible repair

iu
 
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The English version of the book is called Continental Knitting by Esther Bondesen published circa 1946. It's long out of print, but you can find copies second hand, try Amazon or Abe books. It's very much a knitters books, lots of patterns. If you just want to learn Swiss darning as a repair technique, there's loads of information about that online.

Here's a ravelry project for the sweater below, from the same book - I'm planning to knit this one sometime. It's stranded knitting, no swiss darning here.
https://www.ravelry.com/projects/Zetamamman/lusekofta

image_medium2.jpg
 
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