Knit Peone Tee and Pattern by Claire Borchardt

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Here is my finished Peone Tee by Claire Borchardt from Autumn and Indigo.

Knit Peone Tee and Pattern by Claire Borchardt

The Peone Tee is a slightly cropped tee that is knit seamlessly from the top down in the round. This is my favourite method of construction for tees and sweaters! The pattern calls for a lace motif across the yoke before splitting for the sleeves. Next, you place the sleeves on hold while knitting the rest of the body in stockinette. Once the body is completed, the sleeves are picked up and finished with an i-cord bind off. Someone on instagram had knit this and found she liked an i-cord finish on the bottom hem instead of the ribbing. Ribbing doesn’t look great in this yarn so I might do the same as her!

The Peone Tee calls for 533 – 1629 m of fingering-weight yarn. The original pattern uses wool yarn, but I wanted to knit this for summer. So instead, I used 100% linen yarn. Katia Lino 100% in the beige colourway. I love wearing linen; I’ve also sewn myself linen dresses and skirts. Knit linen is very cool and lightweight compared to cotton or wool. As the linen yarn doesn’t have great memory and starts out kind of stiff, I found knitting the lace yoke to be challenging. Thankfully the lace blocked out nicely, as it looked quite messy when freshly knit.

I used 3.5 mm needles to knit this tee, instead of the 4.5 mm ones recommended. Due to my loose gauge, I normally size down my needles by about 1.0 mm. I don’t like knitting gauge swatches, and thankfully I got gauge with my needle choice. The pattern has nine sizes, from a bust of 33″ to 65.” I chose to knit size 4, which has a bust measurement of 45.”

I cast on on July 1, and it took me about 6 weeks to knit. Not bad considering I’m taking care of Kenji all day! And in fingering weight yarn no less! Perhaps I could accomplish this because the whole body is just stockinette stitch. The lace yoke required concentration, but I could knit the rest while minding Kenji or watching TV.

Linen yarn can have the tendency to twist in a final garment, so I tried adding two mock seams to my tee. At the midpoint of each side, I added a column of purl stitches. Hopefully this keeps my tee hanging straight and along the grain.