Stitch a Lightweight Top with a Touch of Lace

It took almost all summer but I’m finally getting interested in knitting some tops for the summer. I have so many long-sleeved, cozy sweaters, which is great, but I don’t have a lot of stuff I made to wear when it’s hot outside.

I’ve got my eye on the Wild Flowers Tee from Tif Neilan as a solid option to stitch for summer. It’s a fingering weight top worked from the top down, mostly in garter and stockinette stitch, with a little bit of lace at the top on the front.

The easy drop shoulder construction makes this a good project for someone who hasn’t knit a garment before, though it will take some time to knit even though it’s mostly stockinette because of the fineness of the yarn. The shoulders are shaped with short rows but that’s probably the most “complicated” skill required in the project. There’s also a provisional crochet cast on, and instructions for both the cast on and the German short rows called for are provided in the pattern. You’ll also need to be able to pick up stitches.

The pattern suggests using stitch markers to mark each of the repeats in the lace pattern, in which case you would need 10 to 18 markers for the lace section, depending on the size you are knitting, plus a different marker for the end of the round.

The pattern comes in nine sizes up to a chest measurement of 66 inches/165 cm. It is designed to be worn with 5-7 inches of positive ease. You can also choose to knit a size with less ease, but you’ll want to try on the garment before and while knitting the sleeves to make sure that they fit comfortably with the reduced ease. It’s also written to a cropped length but you can adjust that as well, though you will need more yarn.

Check the pattern out on Ravelry.

[Photo: Tif Neilan.]

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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