Add a Gorgeous Little Knit Cover to Your Summer Outfits

Sometimes it’s hard to keep wearing your knits in spring and summer if you’re the type who has a warm nature. You can knit tees and tank tops, and even summer dresses, but it can also be nice to have a little knit cover to throw on in the evening when it’s a little cool or when you step into somewhere that’s cooler than outside.

The Stratum pullover/poncho by Yumiko Alexander is a great example of this type of garment. It’s just two big rectangles sewn together at the shoulders, with a little bit of sewing to make a “sleeve” on each side.

It’s worked with two fine weight yarns held together to make a DK weight (or you could start with a DK weight if you happen to have some handy). This makes it super light so it shouldn’t make you feel hot to wear it.

There are lace panels across the top of each piece, with a faux seam down the center to break up the eyelets. There’s also lace running down the sides, forming the edge of the sleeve and the sides of the garment. It’s rated for intermediate knitters because of the lace, but if you’ve worked lace before you should be fine with this project.

The piece is one size in width (43 inches), with three options for the length: 16, 20 and 24 inches, so you can decide if you want it cropped, long or somewhere in between. There are instructions for how to make the panels narrower or wider if you need to as well.

This would be a great little garment to wear over summer dresses or even to your fancy summer events when you want to wear something special that you made.

The pattern is available in English and Japanese, and you can get a copy on Ravelry.

[Photo: Yumiko Alexander.]

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations.

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind.

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca.

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl.

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions.

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic).

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only.

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns.

[Photo: Yarnspirations]

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