A Sweater to Knit for Warmer Days

As a person who is pretty much always cold, I wear sweaters throughout the year. Sometimes I will wear lighter weight sweaters, or even short-sleeved sweaters, but there is often a sweater nearby even when it’s hot outside.

The Elton Pullover by Joji Locatelli is a great sweater pattern to knit for warmer weather, even if you’re not a person who is cold all the time.

It combines a fingering weight yarn and a lace weight mohair, but not in the way you might expect. Instead of both strands of yarn being held together while you work, this project has you work them in stripes. That means you end up with more solid bands of fabric where the fingering weight yarn is used, and fuzzy, see-through stripes where you are knitting with the mohair.

The textural contrast is a lot of fun, and the airflow provided keeps you from getting too hot when you wear it.

The pattern is a pullover version of a previously published cardigan pattern, so check that out, too, if a cardigan is more your style.

The pullover version is available in 10 sizes with chest measurements ranging from 30 to 60 inches. It’s designed to be worn with about 16 inches of positive ease, so the actual sweater measurements range from 44 to 80 inches. Of course if your chest measurement is larger than 44 you can adjust the level of ease by working a different size.

The design features a crew neck and drop shoulders, and is worked in the round from the top down. It’s available in both English and Spanish. You can get the patterns on Ravelry for the pullover and the cardigan version.

[Photo: Joji Locatelli.]

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I generally think of adding color as a way to add interest to a sweater. You can easily throw in stripes or a bit of Fair Isle patterning, even on a sweater that’s meant to be plain, to make it a little more fun.

But there’s also something to be said for working a sweater in a solid color and using textured stitch patterns to make a project more interesting.

Tressa Weidenaa’s Bluewater Sweater began as wrap design, and then a cowl she designed for a class. The stitches looked to her like they would also be good on a sweater yoke, so the Bluewater Sweater was born, too.

The textured stitches are meant to look like ripples on water, inspired by a lake her family visited when she was young. It’s all knits and purls and a single color, which would make it a nice first sweater or one when you’re still early in your knitting journey.

The sweater is worked from the top down in DK weight or light worsted yarn and has a circular yoke. The pattern is charted, but just knits and purls worked in the round makes for pretty easy chart reading. There are 11 sizes to chose from, with a finished garment circumference ranging from 40.5 to 65.75 inches, or 103 to 168 cm. You can choose the amount of ease you would like, but it’s meant to have 4 to 6 inches, or 10 to 15 cm of positive ease.

You can buy this pattern on Ravelry, and if you’re interested in how the stitch pattern looks in other designs, also check out the Bluewater Cowl and Shawl. It’s really interesting to see how to same basic knit and purl patterns can be put to such different uses, or even just how they look different when stitched in different colors. Isn’t knitting fun?

[Photo: Tressa Weidenaar]

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