Web-Letter, Issue 30 – Soft Linen Jacket The Weather in My Office: My day goes something like this: Early in the morning, I walk into a chilly office and put on my Office Sweater—a scratchy gray thing with holes in the elbows, a sweater I’ve had for so long that I don’t remember buying it. Soon, the radiator begins to clank and, especially if it’s a sunny day and the humidifier is pumping, I find myself typing away in a mini-tropical zone. Off comes the sweater, crank-crank on the radiator knob to turn down the heat, and up comes the window a crack. Within a short while, a crisp cool front has moved in and banished the tropics—on with the sweater, down with the window, crank-crank on the radiator knob. And so it goes. All this to say that this week’s Year Round Cardi might suit me better than my current office wear. Designed by Mari Lynn Patrick, the sweater is neither summer nor winter in style or fiber. It’s worked in my current all-time favorite yarn, CEY’s Soft Linen.
The Story: Mari Lynn Patrick is a knitting wizard. There’s little that she can’t do with stitches or sweater shaping. If you’re not familiar with her work—she’s been designing for a long time—it would behoove you to find some old issues of Vogue Knitting or Interweave Knits and check out what she does.  I’ve learned a great deal about the possibilities of knitting from studying Mari Lynn’s designs and the way she takes a simple technique like cabling or decreasing and uses it to create a sweater that's totally knittable, yet hardly predictable.   Occasionally, when we’re struggling to come up with designs that are interesting and wearable, we’ll send a picture from a magazine or catalog to a designer and ask her to take the concept and come up with something with a similar look and feel. This jacket is Mari Lynn’s adaptation of a photo we sent her of a short jacket with exposed seams and smocked sleeves. Mari Lynn changed the smocking to a knitted stitch pattern. Instead of yarn wraps around rib columns, she cabled the ribs to make diamond shapes and worked reverse stockinette stitch at their junctions to suggest the horizontal lines of smocking. Look closely at the shoulder seams; they lie outside the jacket—a small detail that, along with the deep ribbed cuffs and rolled edges on sleeves and collar, give the jacket a casual, homey feel. Just the kind of thing to become my favorite Office Sweater.  The Yarn: Soft Linen — 35% linen, 35% wool, 30% baby alpaca Soft Linen is composed of an interesting blend of fibers that together make a yarn that works perfectly in all seasons. Cool, crisp linen, combined with the soft warmth of alpaca and the elasticity of wool, is comfortable to wear all year round. Garments knitted in Soft Linen have a nice drape while providing just the right amount of warmth.  Learn more about linen. Learn more about wool. Learn more about alpaca. Where to buy Soft Linen.	more photos The Pattern: Here's the free downloadable Soft Linen Jacket pattern The Stitches: Mari Lynn’s design called for an exposed seam around the armhole, but we had trouble getting it to look right. We tried many different ways of getting this seam to show on the outside of the garment, but  each technique displayed something we weren't thrilled with—except the crocheted one. Crocheted seams can be used as a regular seaming technique on the inside of the garment or as a way of creating a uniform seam on the outside of a garment, as in the Soft Linen Jacket. Learn how to work a crochet seam.
On Ravelry? Find this design. If you do not yet have access to Ravelry, add your e-mail to their list, and check back once you've received your invitation.
Sign up to receive weekly Web-Letters from Classic Elite. Email: