What to do with half a skein of Bernat Hand­i­craft cot­ton that’s been in my stash since the late 1990s? Make a retro cropped top :D

It’s a cropped top because I don’t have enough yarn to make a full length sweater. And this colour is prob­a­bly dis­con­tin­ued, so it’s unlike­ly that I can get more of it. I do real­ly like the colours in this var­ie­gat­ed cot­ton though. It’s just that every time I try to cro­chet some­thing with it the colours tend to clump togeth­er (as I lat­er found out, the prop­er knitting/crocheting term is “pool­ing”, as in the colours “pool­ing” togeth­er). So I thought maybe a knit pat­tern would decrease the pool­ing a bit.

I adapt­ed the cap sleeve lat­tice top by The Purl Bee. Made some sim­ple changes to accom­mo­date the heav­ier yarn (the orig­i­nal pat­tern uses a sport weight yarn), so I thought I’d share them here in case any­one would like to make a sim­i­lar top.

I used:

Worsted weight cot­ton. I’m not sure how many yards I had left in the left­over skein, but I still have quite a bit left­over after the sweater, so I’d say the sweater used about 450–500 yards.

6mm nee­dles

Fin­ished size: Bust 38″, length 15″

What I did:

CO 61 (can adjust for size by cast­ing on more or few­er stitch­es, just make sure that there is an odd num­ber of stitches)

Work in garter stitch (knit every row) for 5 rows.

Work in lat­tice pat­tern (as per The Purl Bee) until piece is 15″ (or as long as you like), end with lat­tice row 3.

Neck open­ing row 1 : k 15, BO 31, k 15

Neck open­ing row 2: work in pat­tern for first 15 stitch­es,  CO 31 (see The Purl Bee’s instruc­tion for cable cast on), work in pat­tern for remain­ing 15 stitches.

Work in pat­tern until piece is 14″ from neck open­ing (or as long as you like, match­ing length of the the back minus the garter stitch rows).

Work in garter stitch for 5 rows, bind off.

With right sides togeth­er, sew sides togeth­er, leav­ing an open­ing of 7″ from top of shoul­der to under­arm (or length as you see fit).

And it’s done! :D

We hap­pened to be at High Park on the week­end so I took some pic­tures of it by the duck pond :D

I have to say that the pool­ing was still hap­pen­ing with all the dark pur­ple clump­ing togeth­er in large areas, so I end­ed up divid­ing the skein of yarn into two balls, and knit­ting two rows from each ball alter­nate­ly, which def­i­nite­ly helped.

 

Wish­ing you a fan­tas­tic week!