Knitting: Braided-Rib Crop Top
May 2003
Vogue Knitting Very Easy Knits
Jakobsdals Domino yarn, Teal

This is a very simple summer sweater, made to look nice with jeans or shorts. I had five skeins of this yarn handed down to me years ago: it's a 95% cotton/5% nylon slighly nurled yarn, thinner than sport weight but heavier than sock yarn. With each skein weighing in at 50g, I was worried about material, but this sweater only required four of the five skeins (though it required every inch of those five skeins). I've had no luck tracking this yarn down on-line (it's labeled as being produced in Goteborg, Sweden and from the wrapper appears to be old), but I liked it a lot for this project. The pattern stitch is fairly simple, showing off the texture of the yarn, while the cables supply enough visual interest to keep the single-color sweater from being boring.

The sweater was exceptionally easy to make. The construction is a separately worked front and back which are then sewn together and the neck and sleeve edgings are peiced in. The braided-rib cable is just a one stitch swap over itself, so no cable needle is required (yay!), and there's really no row or stitch counting except for a very small number of shaping rows. I knocked the whole thing off in a week, though it was admittedly a week during the Stanley Cup playoffs.

The sweater is supposed to be short, but it would be trivial to lengthen it as desired by repeating the pattern more times befor beginning the armhole shaping (the pattern includes a sketch of the dimensions showing how to do so). As-is, the patter does not call for a ribbed bottom, but I was being conservative with my measurements when making the sweater for fear of running out of yarn and, when it turned out I had plenty of yarn left and a desire to cover a bit more of my midrift, I worked an inch and a half of ribbing onto the bottom. While the neck and armhole ribbings are worked in a smaller needle than the body, I used the larger sized needle for the bottom edging to prevent it from pulling in excessively at the waste and maintain the boxy crop-top look.

In retrospect, I would have liked the head opening to be a bit larger; it is fairly snug to pull down over my head. However, the mock-turtle neckline clearly looks best when it is fairly snug, so I wouldn't recommend enlarging it significantly. In the end, it's a very cute sweater top, and the pattern was ludicrously easy. It would make a wonderful project for a beginner.

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