A quick and very pleasant knit I made for my daughter. She's been asking me for a lace top for years and I kept putting it off until I finally found the perfect match - Cancun Boxy Lace Top, free pattern on Ravelry and Alize Lino, a gorgeous fluid linen-viscose mix.
I ordered the yarn last year from the same sale I bought the viscose for my previous FO. I expected it to be in a natural color but it was more of a neutral grey. And I generally avoid grey. Besides I had just done an experiment dyeing a linen mix fabric (more on that soon), so I thought this yarn was the perfect candidate to replicate my dyeing experiment on yarn.
The problem - how to dye big quantities of yarn, when I don't have a large dyeing pot. What I decided to do - I placed all the five 50 g skeins in hot water, salt and cotton dye in a plastic washing basin (enough space and water, not enough heat) and after the yarn had absorbed most of the dye I wrapped each skein individually in a piece of stretch foil and heated each of them for two minutes in the microwave oven. Then I let them cool for the night. On the next morning I washed them and all the skeins turned out identically nuanced (no more one skein much darker than the others). I'm very very pleased with my dyeing job and the color I got with the scarlet red dye on the grey linen-viscose yarn.
Pattern: Cancun Boxy Lace Top by Erin Kate Archer
Yarn: Alize Lino, 25% linen 75% viscose, 220 g, hand dyed
Needle: 4 mm
Time to knit: 9 days
The pattern is very simple - two identical rectangles, sewn together at the shoulders and the sides. I used three-needle bind off for the shoulder seams and mattress stitch for the side seams. The pattern is more like a recipe, not so much a detailed set of instructions. I made my own calculations for my yarn and worked the sequence of the various laces mostly on a whim as I went. I'm absolutely in love with the final result and I wish to incorporate these lace stitch patterns in other knitting projects as well.
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