Knit Summer Tops with a Bit of Lace

This time of year I annually try to convince everyone that you can still knit and wear knit garments in the summer. One way to do that is knitting short sleeved or sleeveless shirts. But you can make it even cooler (and a little less plain) by adding a bit of lace.

Lace literally makes your projects lighter, but it also provides a bit of ventilation that makes your clothes more comfortable to wear. So let’s check out some knit tops with lace for summer knitting.

Live your cottagecore dreams with the Nostalgia Tee from Auguste Knit. This DK weight top is vintage inspired and includes an allover lace pattern on the front and sleeves and most of the back. It’s worked in one piece from the bottom up and is available in five sizes. You can find the pattern on Ravelry.

A more subtle design but with a fun wavy lace pattern is the Cloudbreak Tee from Wool & Pine. This pretty top uses DK weight yarn and has classic t-shirt styling with a lacy twist. It comes in 11 sizes up to a 72 inch/183 cm bust. It has a seamless set in sleeve design that’s a lot of fun and produces a great fit. It can be worked with long or short sleeves and the lace pattern is both written and charted. Learn more on Ravelry.

If you want the lace to be more of an accent than a major design element, check out Ophelia by Star Crossed Knits. This pretty design can be a tank top, short sleeved or long sleeved project, and it features a bit of lace around the neckline, sleeves/armholes and hem. It’s worked from the top down in fingering weight yarn and comes in nine sizes.

Add a little simple lace to the top of your knit shirt to make it lighter with this pattern from Little Theorem. This project is worked seamlessly from the top down and has a slightly drapey neckline and little cap sleeves. It’s available in nine sizes and uses lace weight yarn.

Another option with a bit of lace on the top is Lokta by Joan Forgione, available on Ravelry. The yoke portions are worked back and forth in rows, then joined to work the stockinette stitch section in the round. The pattern calls for a fingering weight yarn plus mohair (or use a light DK), and the lace is both written and charted. The design has eight sizes available.

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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