Patterns, projects and techniques
This fun knit top adds a lot of texture to your summer knitting projects. The April Top from Luciana Lopez for Manos del Uruguay features an easy repeating geometric pattern and a split hem.
It’s worked both flat and in the round and uses a sport weight blend of cotton and alpaca. It’s sized up to 3X and the pattern is available in English and Spanish.
You can grab the free pattern on Ravelry.
[Photo: Manos del Uruguay.]
I don’t share patterns for kids clothes nearly often enough (probably because my teen long ago aged out of kid sizes) but I’m going to try to make more of an effort for those of you who are knitting for kids, grandkids, charity projects, etc.
If you fall in those categories, let me know what kind of projects you might be looking for and I’ll do my best to find some and share them for you!
In the meantime, there’s this. The Log Cabin Style knit pullover from Lion Brand yarn is exactly what it sounds like. The back of the sweater is plain and a single color, but the front uses blocks like a log cabin design, and the sleeves are striped.
The pattern calls for Lion Brand Wool-Ease, which comes in tons of colors so you can use school colors, your child’s favorite colors or just what you have in the house. In all it uses five colors.
The pattern comes in three sizes, meant to be for ages 6-8, 8-10 and 10-12. The finished chest measurement ranges from 28 to 32 inches, or 71 to 81.5 cm.
The pattern is available for free on the Lion Brand website, but you will need to sign up for a free account to download it if you don’t already have one.
You can of course buy a full kit of yarn direct from Lion Brand if you like.
If you’ve never stitched a log cabin project before, I think you’ll find this to be a lot of fun and you will start thinking of all sorts of ways to use this technique in different projects. (And if you want a quick overview of what log cabin knitting is and how it works, I have a post on my website all about log cabin knitting where I show it being used to make a pillow.)
[Photo: Lion Brand Yarn]