Lopi Sweater Knitting Pattern

There are a lot of knitting styles that you could consider classics, especially when it comes to sweaters. From ganseys and Fair Isle jumpers to Cowhican sweaters and lopi sweaters, there are so many great ways for a knitter to keep themselves and their family warm.

Lopi sweaters are a traditional style from Iceland, knit with a circular yoke with a colorwork design and using Icelandic wool. Knitters around the world can make these lovely and warm sweaters because this particular wool is pretty widely available.

The Petite Knitter’s lopi pattern has a design of crosses, snowflakes and diamonds, and color choices inspired by the sunset in the Arctic (she lives in archipelago islands).

The sweater’s design is boxy, and is worked seamlessly from the top down with a circular yoke. It is available in 11 sizes, with a chest measurement ranging from 32.25 to 73 inches. The intended positive ease is from 4.5 to 9.5 inches (positive ease means how much bigger the sweater is than your actual chest measurement).

As designed the project uses six colors of worsted weight yarn, but you could also use a self-striping yarn or multicolored yarn in the colorwork section if you didn’t want to make all those color changes by hand. There are a couple of projects on the pattern’s project page on Ravelry that show it worked with fewer colors if you want to check that out before you try it.

I have one Lopi sweater that I designed for my colorwork knitting book (in a heavier weight Icelandic wool that is very warm, even by my standards). It’s so fun to use this traditional material and feel a connection to all those knitters of the past who needed this hearty wool for warmth — and those who still do!

You can get the pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: The Petite Knitter.]

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It’s one thing to follow a knitting pattern and get the fit that the designer wanted for that particular project. But it’s quite another thing to decide how you want your sweater to fit and making a project work for you.

Designer Kim McBrien Evans aims to help knitters understand why sweater patterns don’t always work for them the way they expect and what to do about it in her book The Knitter’s Sweater Fitting Bible.

She describes the book as containing “everything I’ve learned about sweaters, bodies, and the art of fit.” It covers how to plan for a good fit through things like taking measurements and choosing the correct size to knit, understanding ease, reading schematics and fixing fit issues.

Sweater style templates give knitters a place to start knitting better sweaters with made to measure patterns that work with any body, any yarn and any gauge. The book is designed to give knitters confidence to go their own way whether they’re modifying existing patterns, using one of the templates or designing their own custom sweater.

McBrien Evans argues that the best way to make a sweater that will fit well and stand up to lots of wearing is to work from the top down flat in pieces that are seamed when the knitting is done (the exception being circular yoke sweaters, which are worked in the round from the top down). She offers advice for making seaming easier like using selvedges and short rows.

She goes into a lot of detail on how and where to measure yourself and how to understand schematics in knitting patterns to help you choose the correct size for you and know where to adjust. The fixing fit chapter covers how to fit a sweater to your body from the shoulders down, with tips for things like balancing uneven shoulder height, accommodating a larger bust, using different shaping on the front and back of a sweater for better fit, fixing neckline depth and fixing sleeve and body lengths.

The book includes photos and drawings of people of different sizes and with physical differences such as a smaller limb or having a mastectomy on one side, which is nice and helps you see how these concepts work on different bodies.

The sweater templates offer options like a straight body, A-line and waist shaping body; set in sleeve caps and armholes, straight raglans and modular compound raglans, drop shoulders and circular yoke shaping; crew, scoop and V-neck options; a variety of sleeve templates, neckline finishes, and button hole options for cardigans.

It’s easy for all this to feel overwhelming if you’re trying to read the book cover to cover, but it’s good to know that all of those options are there if you need them. There are also nine design profile sweaters that show you how all the pieces go together that you can knit through to help you understand some of the concepts.

A fit kit in the back walks you through the math so you’ll feel comfortable with things like determining your rate of shaping, adding darts, shaping diagonals and calculating the lengths of curved edges, among other things.

The good news is you’re not going to need all of these tools for every project. The better news is that now you know these are things you can do to make your sweaters fit better, and you’ll have McBrien Evans as your able guide every step of the way.

While this might not be a book you want to spring on a new sweater knitter, it’s a guide that everyone who enjoys knitting garments should have on hand to reference ways to make sweaters they want to knit — from written patterns or designing for themselves — that much better.

About the book: 192 pages, hardcover, 9 patterns. Published 2026 by David & Charles. Suggested retail price $29.99.

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