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Pattern: My own
Size: 32″ bust, 13″ to underarm on body, 5" sleeve length, 7" sleeve opening
Yarn: Interlacements Tokyo (50 percent merino wool, 50 percent silk; 500 yds per 100 g skein), color Taiga; Jaggerspun Zephyr Wool-Silk 2-18 Lace Weight (50 percent Chinese tussah silk, 50 percent fine merino wool; 630 yds per 2 oz), color Basil, held double
Yardage: About 475 yards of Tokyo and 650 yds of Zephyr
Source: Interlacements Yarns; Sarah’s Yarns 
Needles: US 4 (3.5 mm) Knit Picks Harmony circular needles
Gauge: 24 sts and 36 rows = 4″ in pattern
Notes: This project began with the yarn, which I bought through a Yahoo wholesale group a few years ago. Since that time, I have discovered that I am far more interested in knitting garments in solid and semi-solid yarns than in variegated ones, which left me with a bit of a dilemma regarding how to use up the thousand yards of wool/silk in my possession. My plan when I bought the yarn was to make a shawl, but that impulse faded fast. Later, I had the idea of using the Tokyo combined with some matching solid-colored Zephyr to make a baseball-shirt-style sweater with three-quarter-length sleeves — a sort of soft, warm, refined throwback to the popular baseball t-shirts of my youth. I still think that would have been kind of cute, but I sat on the idea long enough that I grew bored with it.

In search of another plan, I discovered wave and box stitch in Barbara Walker’s second treasury of knitting patterns, swatched it, and became smitten. In the book, this pattern is shown in high-contrast yarns, but I love how using two similar colors results in a fabric that seems to have a cellular structure but doesn’t give away the secrets of its construction without close scrutiny. The pattern breaks up the variegation but retains all the interesting color play; it manages to be colorful without, I think, being garish.

I decided to pair wave and box stitch with bands of garter stitch at all the edges of the top. This idea came straight out of Maggie Righetti’s Sweater Design in Plain English, which was also the source of my notion to try out the garment shape she calls a "T-topper." The planning from that point forward was quick and simple: I drew a sketch and a diagram and jotted down about three lines of instructions in my notebook. Then all I had to do was knit, block, and seam.

Since the T-topper shape is something of a throwback to the 1980s (and I am not the kind of gal to wear legwarmers), I wasn’t altogether sure how the finished garment would look on me. It turns out that it’s a pretty flattering cut — and I realized belatedly that I actually have a similarly constructed shirt in my closet that I’ve been wearing to dressy functions for about six years. Duh.

Creating the Tokyo top was simple and pleasurable, and I am so enamored of the result that I intend to write up the pattern and make it available alongside my other free designs in the near future.

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Other posts about the Tokyo top: