Saddle Shoulder Sweater

Another gal and I are teaching saddle shoulder sweater construction to our guild.  Since I had never knit one with this shape, I thought I better practice.  I used DAK and came up with approximately size 8 for my grandson.  You can barely see where the saddle shoulder is in the picture,  but it's there.   I faithfully did my swatch out of Piropo yarn because I had both the red and white in that brand. And red and white is my favorite color combination for a Norwegian sweater. It turned out kind of scratchy, though, and I thought a little kid wouldn't like that at all.  So I found some Tamm Sport in my stash with both blue and white, so I went with that.  Much softer.

The pattern is Dale of Norway's Nagano design.  My grandson likes dinosaurs, so I thought this was kind of close.  I just used the yoke section of the design, not the trim at the bottom and sleeves in their pattern.

However, I liked my swatch so much that I made a doggie sweater out of it. (Note the insert in the picture.)  It was really simple to do:  did mock ribs for the neck and bottom, then added a gusset for the belly. The armholes for the front legs are just holes that are not seamed to the gusset. You can add ribbing for the sleeves, but I didn't think it was necessary. My grandson's dog is little, so it was possible to make it work.  I think it will be really cute to see them walking down the street with matching "sweaters".

If you have a smallish dog, you too can use a favorite swatch for the top of the sweater.  I found a free dog sweater pattern and made the gusset to match his size in width and length.  I tried to also match the distance from neck to leg openings.  So hopefully this one will fit him ok.  Strangely enough, he likes to be warm and doesn't mind wearing sweaters.

I think autumn is really serious about showing up.  Time to think about warmer clothes.  And more knitting.