Route 1 Summer Sweater

The first one of my summer knitting projects is finished: Route 1 summer sweater.
And I am so happy and a little sad about it.
Sad, because I had a lot of fun knitting this sweater and also knitting with the super soft Malabrigo Sock yarn which is just relaxing in itself, feeling the smooth merino fibres flowing over your hands.

But I am SO MUCH MORE HAPPY about my new summer sweater! :)
It is so beautiful, so soft and so light! The entire sweater only weighs about 180g (which means I've got some 20g of yarn left :) ), I can barely feel it when wearing the sweater. Just the perfect summer piece!

As you may remember, I bought two skeins of Malabrigo Sock in color persia without having a particular project for it in mind.
But soon I knew I wanted to make a summer sweater. So, I looked around for a nice pattern to make it a summer holiday knit. And this way I wanted to be able to hold on to this year's summer a little bit longer by wearing the sweater during the first small chills of fall. And I found the right pattern: Route 1 by Norah Gaughan. It had everything: Cables and lace (important for a summer sweater :) ), 3/4 sleeves, deep v-neck, rather short body, easy to knit. (Btw, you can find the free pattern by Norah Gaughan here.)


Although the pattern called for aran weight yarn, I swatched with my sock yarn and 4mm needles because I found it to be the perfect pattern for the kind of project I had in mind.
Of course I had a smaller gauge (21 sts instead of 17sts as in the pattern), but after some thought, I decided to simply follow the instructions for size M in order to get size S out of it with my gauge.
The only thing I had to change were the raglan decreases. I had to add some rows to it in order to get a fitting armhole depth. I simply added some rows without decreases that were evenly spaced throughout the raglan shaping.

So, after all my mods include:
- Using sock yarn instead of aran; therefore following size M instructions to get size S.
- Tweaking with the raglan decreases. The armhole depth would have been insufficient because of my gauge of 30rows/10cm; so I decided not to decrease on every fourth RS row, adding 12 rows to the raglan length.
- Adding another pattern repeat in the front to make the sweater a little bit longer than stated in the pattern.
- I did not follow the instructions for the "fluffy sleeves"; measured myself and knitted more fitting sleeves instead.
- And I did an I-cord bind off instead of neck extensions; after seaming I picked up stitches around the back neck and then immediately used i-cord bo made from three extra stitches.

And this beautiful sweater really draws attention to it! Last week while shopping for food I even had an older lady look over her glasses, haha! 😃

I so love this sweater and this color! 💕
Now, I feel like it isn't even that bad that eventually summer will come to an end.

So, if you like this pattern but were hesitating because of using aran weight yarn, I can definately recommend making Route 1 in sock weight using bigger needles! The result is amazing!
It is such a beautiful design, i love it!


Of course you can find this project on Ravelry as well.

I hope you are having an amazing time this summer!

All the best!
Stefanie :)