Fit for an engineer! Finnish Meiju knitted a very special sweater for her partner Markku

Meiju, you’ve knitted an engineer sweater for your partner. What a fun idea! How did the project come about?

Meiju: I told Markku I’d knit him anything he liked as long as he designed the motif himself. He’s already used to counting rows and stitches with me, and to brainstorming patterns for sweaters.

Markku: Of course I’ll become a knitwear designer for this! I pondered motifs related to my hobby since I got to design my own sweater. In the end we chose a simplified circuit diagram of a guitar distortion pedal that I drew 40 years ago.

Trained as a telecommunications engineer, Markku began building guitar effects and amplifiers when he started his studies in the 1980s. The sweater’s motif comes from a circuit diagram he sketched 40 years ago. The design is clear enough to knit, and pros in the field recognize it at a glance.

Meiju and Markku worked out the stitch counts and measurements for the sweater together.

Meiju: We used my experience and his existing sweaters to estimate the size.

Markku: I started building Excel spreadsheets and calculating stitch counts. Then we visited about a million yarn shops, weighing colors and materials until we found these on a trip to Helsinki.

After a long search, Järvenpää natives Meiju and Markku found the perfect yarn in Helsinki—Schachenmayr’s Extrafine Merino 170.

Here it is! The finished sweater was a belated birthday gift for Markku.

Meiju: As soon as we bought the yarn, I cast on and got going. I reached the motif band while Markku was away and I was home sniffling with a cold. I had to squeeze in a few more urgent sweaters in between, but if you don’t count the break, this one took about a month. One evening the finished, blocked sweater was waiting at home when Markku returned from band practice.

Markku: Meiju managed to bring the image in my head to life, which was amazing. The best part was doing it together. I’m sure no one else in the world has a sweater like this.

Meiju: It’s fun to create all sorts of quirky things with Markku. He already knows a lot about yarn and knitting.

Markku: I’m proud of both of us.

Meiju: Me too! Let’s see what I make next. I just finished our daughter’s mohair dream, and now I’m working on colorwork socks as a Midsummer gift. Normally I don’t plan this carefully—I just follow whatever I’m into at the moment.

Markku: Keep it up, Meiju!