How to Knit Your Best Breeze Racerback

For a long time this was probably my favourite of Jessie Mae’s patterns. To actually make it, I needed the perfect yarn, and all my favourite Breeze Racerbacks I’ve seen were faded, with a darker colourway on the bottom, so I needed 2 of the perfect yarns, a darker, and a lighter.

At a Yarn Ink pop-up at Stash I finally decided to get a skein of Malibu, which I’d been admiring for awhile, so then I just needed a lighter skein to coordinate. I settled on a colourway called Ghostly, which I’ve also admired for awhile, from The Fawn and The Fox. I have so much yarn from these 2 dyers who are in the Calgary area, and these 2 skeins, in my opinion, coordinated perfectly!

Some things I looked for to get the best fade possible:

• Similar yarn base – same fibre content, same feel, same ply & twist
• Similar speckle colours (as many as possible – I focused on the navy and pink here)
• Prominence of speckled colours that were the same and different (was there enough navy and pink in each skein for the fade to make sense, or were they really sporadic?)

Unlike with my Ripple Buttshorts, I actually got very close to gauge for this pattern, and I was surprised the fabric wasn’t more open for how big of a needle this pattern uses. I’m constantly impressed by what you can do with sock yarn.

I always like having a mindless stockinette project to work on and this was a really good one since once I was done the bottom ribbing, I could just knit for ages until I wanted to fade in my second colour. And because I made it a little longer than the pattern calls for this stockinette section went on a little longer!

My fade was done using helical knitting over 10 rows. Then I did another 10 rows in the lighter colour before I started the V-neck. If you want to either do a knit fade, or prevent pooling while knitting with hand-dyed yarn, then I’d recommend doing helical knitting. I’m still working on getting the change between my yarns to be more invisible. The first time I did my change it looked like it was too loose. But to compensate, I did my next one too tight, and everything seemed to just stay tight at that switch off, which now looks like a fake seam.

One of the things I was worried about was the V-neck being too low. The first time I did the straps I did fewer decreases so they were fatter behind the back, and adjusted the back to compensate for joining the 3 ends. When I tried it on though it was not really a V-neck, it was right up to my neck. So I went back and ended up following the pattern exactly.

The most challenging part of this knit is making sure when you do your three-needle bind-off to join up the front and back straps, you don’t twist the straps. Because you are working with so few stitches and stockinette curls, it can be difficult to keep things straight. To keep it straight you really just need to take your time, and keep checking that everything is lined up the way it should be.

When I finished and tried on my Breeze Racerback the neck came pretty much to where I wanted. I always recommend blocking your knits, and I find it makes the biggest difference for loose knit things like the Breeze Racerback. I did a wet block as usual and perhaps a little unfortunately it did make the V-neck lower. I think it’s ok still, though not in that perfect place it was before blocking. But the fabric does look much, much smoother! You can see the difference between the flatlay with the meringues above, and in the pictures where I’m wearing the Breeze Racerback.

One more cautionary tale – remember to weave in all your ends! It turns out I missed one and when I put it on to take pictures, the back started to unravel. You can actually see it starting to unravel in this picture. To be honest, I STILL haven’t fixed it. Oh well!