A seamless men’s Jersey

“The sun is rising,” a colleague said to me when she saw me wearing my new crochet jersey for the first time at work. What an awesum praise, thank you, Gaby! The Icelandic Jersey I made some time ago based on an existing pattern (for more, please see this blog post) turned out so well that it inspired me to further pursue the idée fixe that has been haunting me for quite a while: creating a well-fitting jersey or jacket without having to join any garment parts together.

When it comes to that topic, opinions within the crochet and knitting community seem to be divided. While some say that they do not mind sewing in arms, feeling that it is not an issue, others find it complicated, cumbersome and time-consuming, often left dissapointed with the result. Regarding myself as belonging to the latter group, I have spent a couple of years with trial and error to find a solution that really works. Today I am happy to announce that I have finally found a great way to achieve this – here is my crocheted sweater without any seams! That said, I am still busy working on some fine-tuning.

Using organic yarn

This composition of the yarn ensures that you will never feel too warm or too cold on a cool summer evening, throughout autumn or on a mild winter day. The cotton-viscose blend is supposed to keep the garment in shape. I know that the orange colour I chose will not appeal to everyone, but you could have this sweater in any colour of the wide range offerred. The jersey is rather légè and goes well with jeans and casual trousers.

Modifying Raglan

The Raglan method, when worked in the round, is a great way to avoid having to sew garment parts together. However, the downside is that the shape is symmetrical, i.e. that from a bird’s eye view the neckhole is in the middle of the chest, back and arm parts, with all parts having the same length. When looking at the human body in profile, though, to quote South African allround-talent artist Mark Rautenbach, you can see that our neck is not in the middle of the upper body – the chest is wider than the back and the head sticks out more to the chest than to the back. This is why, when wearing a Raglan jersey, the neckband tends to slip towards your throat, which can be disturbing, and leaves a gap on your nape, which can make you feel cold.

So in order to solve this problem, I realized that that the neckhole needed to be moved a little bit upwards on the back and a little bit downwards on the chest. So I spent some time to work that out, until I achieved a satisfying result. I simply created a wide neckhole, filling the gap at the back by a few rows of stitches while leaving the hole open in the front, which did the trick. It took some time, imagination and maths as well as marrying theory and practice, and the measurements and design provided in the aforementioned Icelandic Jersey pattern definitely helped a lot with this, too. In addition I designed this sweater top-down instead of bottom-up. This allows you to adjust the length of the body and the arms while you are heading towards finishing your work, so you will never have to unravel a large part, not to mention to start from scratch.

Creating a jersey without seams also saves you a lot time – as crocheting is quicker to do than knitting, anyway, this sweater can be finished in a jiffy.

Pattern

While I cannot yet offer you a pattern of this crocheted jersey, I am definitely going to write one up some time soon to sell it. I will of course let you all know via my blog and Social Media, once I have published it. I hope to inspire you with this work!