FOUNDER
Marte Stenvaag
CEO & Founder at Dreamknit
Knitting since 2019
Founded Dreamknit in 2020
MSc industrial economics, NTNU
Avoids seaming at all costs
Marte started Dreamknit a year after she learned to knit. It began with a sweater in an expensive shop that she was fairly sure she could make herself.
A friend at university taught her in 2019, and the first thing off her needles was a pair of felted mittens. She has a master's in industrial economics and technology management from NTNU, which is the engineering half of why Dreamknit came out as software rather than a pattern shop.
She still can't do Kitchener stitch from memory. She pulls up our own video every single time.
How Dreamknit started
The sweater was in a shop, at a price she wasn't going to pay, and she was fairly sure she could knit it herself – so she went looking for the pattern, and found that it didn't exist. Not that sweater, and nothing close enough to work from either.
She'd only been knitting a year at that point, and most of that year had been spent lost. There is an enormous amount out there and almost none of it is signposted: thousands of patterns, none of them quite the thing you pictured, and no clear way to work out which yarn goes with what, or what to change if you want the sleeves longer. What she couldn't understand was why there wasn't simply a website where you put the sweater together yourself – the shape you wanted, in the yarn you could actually get hold of – and got the pattern back at the end.
She had an engineering degree, and a garment is really just measurements and rules, so there was no good reason it couldn't be built. Nobody had built it, so she built it herself. Everything since 2020 has been the work of making it hold for every combination someone might pick.
Want to build something with us?
Partnerships, press, or a yarn brand that wants in – send it to hello@dreamknit.no.
Find Marte Stenvaag on LinkedIn, or meet the rest of the team on our About us page.