FO: Golden Poplar

At long last! Golden Poplar is finally done and blocked! Unfortunately it's too hot and humid to actually wear it outside to take pictures. The fabric is essentially two layers of wool, which although fingering weight, forms a sturdy (almost armor-like) and hot fabric that would be unbearable in the heat. So the clotheshanger will model it for now.

The mesh-like pattern is Royal Quilting, which is available in a much easier form in one of the Barbara Walker books. I'm way overdue for contributing a picture to the Walker Treasury Project, but will do so shortly. The pattern is fun, until about 3 inches into a fingering-weight shirt. Then it's really slow, because half the rows are spent slipping the stitches rather than actually knitting, and it's not much fun anymore. In other words, I highly recommend this stitch pattern for a small project!

This top is a vintage pattern, available for free on KnitWiki. The shaping is done entirely with needle sizes, ranging from US 1 to 3. The yarn is Knitpicks Essentials, which is a sock yarn, but worked well for this top since it is non-itchy and is machine washable. I used about 2.5 balls of the green, and about 1 ball of the blue.

The part I put off the longest was doing the edging around the neck and arms. I ended up knitting 1x1 rib around the neck, which helps pull together a rather loose neck, much better than the 3 rows of garter as in the pattern would. I just couldn't bear to pick up stitches around the arms, so I did a row of single crochet, followed by a row of crab stitch to make it a little stiffer. Still, the arm edges turned out a bit too loosey-goosey, and together with the armholes themselves being too big, the whole effect is too frilly. But at this point, this top has been so tedious that I can't bear to take out the edging and do it again. So for now, it'll go into a drawer, and maybe I'll feel better about it when winter is here.