I’m loving this Darlene top in Euroflax Sport. The color is Orchid. My previous summer tops in Euroflax had me using a size 1 needle to get gauge. In this project I’m using a size 2, and it feels so much easier.

Knitting from the top down allows for me to try on the garment as it’s being knit. To avoid dropping any stitches, one can carefully put each stitch on waste yarn, or as I would usually do before, you can throw it on your body without using waste yarn and pick up what comes off the needles after you try it on. The method that didn’t occur to me at all before now is knitting half of the stitches on to another long circular needle and trying it on without losing any stitches. You can see the in the picture above where the needles end to the left of the marker. I used a 32″ and a 40″ needle in this case. I think two 32″ needles or larger would be ideal since the stitches still slip around quite a bit. I can’t believe I haven’t thought of this before, and I’m sure a few dozen other knitting bloggers have already suggested this and I missed it. So much easier.

I added decreases to this pattern along the sides, also shown above. No waist shaping in a top sometimes feels unflattering to me. I think my gauge is slightly looser than the pattern gauge. I like the way it feels and luckily it is not see-through, so it won’t require the tank top shown above.

There’s just a sprint to the finish, full of stockinette and some coming increases. Cheers!