It may still be winter but we're getting ready for the warmer weather. If you want a handknit wardrobe you do have to forward plan, especially if you're a slow garment knitter like me.😆
But it wasn't the coming summer season that inspired our latest shop sample, instead it was an amazing delivery from My Mama Knits and a new yarn base - Float Your Goat.
Float Your Goat is a hand dyed mohair silk blend laceweight. It has a lovely variegated colour effect and a fluffy halo.
Knitted on relatively thick needles it makes a feather light fabric and you don't need much. You can get a decent sized tee shirt with only 50g of yarn.
As an aside you get a pretty decent scarf too! Check out our Mohair Scarf here.
Summer Light is a lightweight cropped tee shirt designed by Julie Knits In Paris. The pattern is available to buy on Ravelry and on her website.
I think it's a perfect pattern for Float Your Goat.
It's knitted in the round from the top down so there's no sewing up - no bulky seams on your delicate garment.
The 'plain' stocking stitch pattern shows off the hand dyed yarn perfectly.
It has pretty raglan shaping which is easy to work - so no tricky increasing with a thin fluffy yarn.
Summer Light is knitted at a loose gauge so the stitches are large and the fabric is open so it doesn't matter if your stitches aren't uniform and even. If you've avoided laceweight garments before this may be a great opportunity to try one.
It's a fast knit - relatively large needles and no sleeves.
It's easy to lengthen Summer Light. Knitted from the top down, you just keep going until you get the length you want. Make sure you have enough yarn though!
Now you may have noticed that I used another yarn for the neckline, sleeves and body ribs.
Summer Light uses a laceweight mohair silk for the body but a 4ply for the ribbing.
You can pick any colour to do this but I picked a matchy matchy colour from our My Mama Knits Choufunga mini skeins collection. These mini skeins have 20g/85m of yarn and as you only need a small amount of 4ply for the ribbing a mini skein is a great way to buy.
I used the shade Toothed Wrack in both Float Your Goat and Choufunga.
Although it was hard to choose. 😆
From left to right - Pink Algae, Toothed Wrack, Rocky Shores (and Urchin), Purple Sea Urchin, Song of the Sea with a Sea Salad mini skein.
You can see all our My Mama Knits Float Your Goat here and our Mini Skeins collection here.
Two technical things:
- you do need to make sure your cast on is very stretchy as this is the neckband. I followed the pattern recommendation and used a German Twisted cast on (or Old Norwegian). I found this tutorial by Andrea Mowry to be helpful.
- This pattern uses simple wrap and turn short rows to raise the back of the neck slightly. This is all explained in the pattern.
And a note on sizing. The pattern includes a range of sizes to fit bust 28” to 52”.
I knitted the shop Summer Light in the M size. This is to fit bust 91cm/36". The tee shirt actually measure 118cm/46.5" around the chest. So the designer is recommending 10.5" of positive ease.
That is, the tee shirt is 10.5" bigger than the wearer.
Check the measurements in the pattern against your own measurements and choose one that gives you the positive ease that you want.
To illustrate the difference in positive ease we have two mannequins in the shop.
One has a 34" bust. 👇
46.5" tee shirt on a 34" mannequin, 12.5" of positive ease
The other mannequin has a 38" bust. 👇
46.5" tee shirt on a 38" mannequin, 8.5" positive ease
We're always happy to talk sizes. And, of course, you can visit the Pittenweem shop if you want to try our Summer Light on.
To recap:
You can buy Summer Light as a digital pattern in the Pittenweem shop (it will be emailed to you) or you can buy on Ravelry or at Julie Knits In Paris.
You can see our selection of My Mama Knits Float Your Goat here and My Mama Knits Choufunga 4ply Mini Skeins here.
If saturated and variegated colours are not your thing you could knit this tee shirt in the softly striped Rowan Kidsilk Haze Colour or the single colour Rowan Kidsilk Haze.
