2021 Favourites: Easy Eyelet Yoke Lite

I’m still here! My husband and I moved two and a half hours north two weeks ago, and it thoroughly kicked my butt. Not least of all because our cat is still adjusting and has yet to go through a whole night without yelling at the top of her lungs. She also figured out how to open our cabinets, so that’s something we’re dealing with. And I still need to unpack and reorganize my yarn stash.

But without further delay, it’s time to reflect on another knitted garment that, despite being a staple of my wardrobe, hasn’t made its way to my blog.

The Easy Eyelet Yoke Lite is part of a four-piece collection of garments designed by Chantal Miyagishima of Knitatude, each featuring a sunburst of eyelets emitting from the collar down the chest. The Easy Eyelet Yoke Lite is an all-season-friendly short-sleeved mod of the pattern using fingering weight yarn, where the other patterns call for either DK or Aran weight.

My materials were three balls of beautiful alpaca and wool yarns from Yarn Twisters back in Calgary. Bright red, burnt orange, and mustard yellow came together to create a gorgeous sunset fade with a 70s aesthetic.

A yoke sweater is one that is knit seamlessly from the collar down, with the increases evenly spaced through the different sections up to the part where it’s split off into the sleeves. I like to think of it as an umbrella shape that you stick your head through.

I love a good colour code, and I found it made my first yoke pattern easier to follow. Especially the shaping at the back and the rows between increases. I further modded the pattern by doing some decreases at the bottom to create a slight bubble-hem look.

Now here’s something funny. Despite the fact that my hometown is literally 37 times the size of the town we just moved to, Calgary was such a small world. You could imagine my awe in learning that Chantal and I not only lived in Calgary at the same time but we also worked in a similar field, and the ad agency she’s at is the very same one that I’d applied to work at a number of times since graduating from my journalism program. In Calgary, it’s way less than six degrees of separation. More like two at most.

When I knit that Easy Eyelet Yoke way back at the beginning of last year, it sparked an adoration for the beginner-friendly, contemporary designs that Knitatude is known for, and a hunger for more.