Dale of Norway Sirdal sleeve cuffs

Today I need to answer some questions I received in the comments. Ruthie is working on finishing another knitter's Dale of Norway Sirdal sweater and asked in the comments to see my sleeve cuffs. Here's my Sirdal from years ago knit in Nature Spun sport weight and yes, it is starting  to pill.



I honestly don't know if I did the sleeve cuffs the right way - I vaguely remember the pattern being confusing. You gotta love those gorgeous braids and buttons though - the buttons are the actual Sirdal buttons designed to be used for this particular design. If anyone does have any questions about knitting a Dale of Norway sweater, I highly recommend the wonderful Dale of Norway group on Ravelry. You can also search for the Sirdal Sweater on Ravelry to find more photos. I don't have time to look through them all but I suspect if you click on each sweater you can find more sleeve cuff photos.




Also, Carissa found my glove knitting booklet on Ravelry and asked if it was a guide for beginners who need to learn the basics on how to knit gloves. I've had this question before and while I think it can be helpful for new glove knitters, it is more helpful for those who understand the glove construction process. It doesn't show the basic process for new glove knitters though; unfortunately I don't know of anywhere online that shows a step-by-step photo or video tutorial on how to divide the stitches for the fingers. One of these days I'll get around to doing that for the blog.

In the meantime, here is the single most valuable diagram from the glove knitting booklet. It is a diagram of how the stitches are divided when knitting gloves; each circle is a finger. The thumb is shown as the largest circle at the bottom left. After the thumb has been deal with (by using either a gusset or peasant thumb), in this diagram there are 48 stitches in a large tube when you get to the fingers. The numbers in blue show how many stitches you take from the front and back of the tube for each finger and the numbers in pink show the stitches that are either cast on or picked up . The numbers inside the circles show the total number of stitches for each finger from 20 for the index finger to 16 for the little finger.



Doing a glove diagram like this can really speed you up when you're knitting someone else's glove pattern and is especially valuable when you're converting a mitten pattern to gloves or designing your own glove pattern.

I hope this helps Carissa - I'd say the best thing to do is to just cast on. Most good glove patterns explain how you go from the large tube for the hand to the tiny tubes for the fingers so if you just follow the pattern you'll have success. I also highly recommend the Glove Knitters group on Ravelry for any technique questions.