last chance for summer knits

I finally finished my summer knitting project: Plum!

One year I will get smart and knit summer things in the spring, and fall things in the summer, so that I actually get a chance to wear them when the weather is still appropriate. We're having a warm October day today, perhaps the last for a while, so I grabbed the opportunity to wear this, now that I finally got around to finishing and blocking it.

I love it!

The yarn is Callista, made by elann.com, and it's a great summery blend of cotton, linen and rayon. The rayon is a slightly darker, shinier ply wrapped around the softer, earthier cotton/linen blend, so the color has some nice depth and texture to it.



The stitch pattern is a purl-twist that makes it look extra-fancy, though it's really pretty simple. Same goes for the points along the neckline.

I knit this blouse top-down as a way to learn how to maintain a fancy stitch pattern when you're also constantly increasing along the raglan seams. This is something I've always wondered about, and discovered that it was not as complicated as you might think. I'm planning to post a tutorial on it some time soon.



This is probably not a design that I'll be writing up as a pattern, because I was doing a lot of adjusting on the fly and really didn't take good enough notes, unfortunately. I'm really happy with the styling and how it came out overall. I need to enjoy every moment of wearing it today -- it may not come out of the closet again until spring!