Roxborough Dolman

There's been a whole lot of knitting and not a lot of posting going on around here.  This winter has been chock full of projects...most of them samples for new patterns, but I did squeeze in a couple "fun knits".  This one was a quickie - it might have taken me a week.  It's a dolman-sleeve sweater made out of Three Irish Girls Adorn Sock yarn.  I happened to be loitering at my local yarn shop on a day they received a bit Three Irish Girls shipment.  I fell in love with the bright pink and bright turquoise yarns that I saw. They had a very 80's vibe to them.  I took a few days to make sure I knew what I wanted to do before I made my purchase, and when I saw this 80's-inspired sweater, I knew it would be a good match.  I couldn't bring myself to go full-on 80's pink & turquoise stripes though, so I just went with one of those colors and mixed it with a nice gray from the TIG collection.

This is a super, super simple design.  The sleeves are not knit separately - the sweater is basically a rectangle that gets wider toward the top, and the sleeves just grow out of the extra ease built in from all the side increases.  

I believe my stripes were 6 rows each, which makes them a little less than an inch wide.  This sweater is great for wearing over a long-sleeve t-shirt in cold weather (it was my favorite "running errands" outfit in the dead of winter because I was warm, but this wasn't bulky under my coat like a bigger sweater would have been.  It's also great for wearing over a tank top in warmer weather.  The fingering-weight yarn makes it quite a versatile piece.

I did a minor modification to the neckline.  Rather than picking stitches up in a circle around the neck, I worked a flat ribbed strip along the front neckline and another along the back neckline, then stitched the down, overlapping at the sides of the neck.  For me, this helped close up the neckline just enough that I can usually keep this sweater up on my shoulders.  The neckline width is easy enough to adjust though - you'd just need to bind off more or less stitches for the neckline, making sure it's evenly centered across the bind-off row.  If I made this top again, I would knit a few extra rows after the neckline bind-off just to drop the neck down an inch or two because right now it does sit a little higher on my chest than I really like.

Pattern is Roxborough Dolman, yarn is Three Irish Girls Adorn Sock in "jellybean" and "little black raincloud".