Made for a friends 50th birthday. I had been wanting to make some of Elsebeth Lavold’s patterns because a lot of her patterns are inspired by antiquity. She designed this from the old iron X’s on houses that kept the stones from falling outwards. We chose Kumara merino wool and baby camel yarn…very soft.

Note: My friend was smaller than the smallest size so I had to change many of the instructions…it was a domino effect. It changed things the whole way through the process. I thought about making the children’s size bigger but it had only 3 panels instead of 5. Took four stitches off each shoulder and one stitch out from between each motif panel to start. The Sleeves are the same width and modified the neck to be smaller and a little shorter.

The neck starts as purls on the front and the back at the end of the the center motifs so as not to continue up the neck as knit stitches. This was a problem because the body was made shorter and the motif panels made shorter so they ran into the neck more.