Instant Jacket

Here's my Instant Jacket! I feel like it was almost instant anyway. I fooled around and didn't stitch it together right away, but now it's done. As I said before, the yarn is from Wal-Mart; they're having a collection made for them in Turkey. It seems to be mostly your average discount type yarn, although almost all novelty types, but I fell in love with this. You can see a pretty good representation of the color in the photo below, at least on my monitor. This shows the shoulder seam on the left, and the edge of the garter stitch collar on the right.



I really like this little cardigan. I think because of the tweedy effect of the yarn, it has quite a fashionable look. I was so close to not-enough-yarn-to-finish that it was scary. I used every single scrap to finish up the collar, and ended up sewing up the seams with heavy thread. You're supposed to do a round of single crochet around the whole thing, but forget that; I was lucky to finish at all. I used beautiful gold crested buttons from Pam at Sew Exciting. I think they add quite a bit to it, and it will be fun and easy to change the buttons if I want a different look sometime. The buttonholes are simply enlarged stitches that I stitched around on the inside to keep them the size I wanted them.

The back neckline on this pattern has a tendency to stretch to a width much wider than is flattering. Instead of a stabilizer like twill tape or anything which might show, I used a doubled heavy thread (30wt. cotton) to stitch by hand along the edge to stabilize it and to pull it in to the measurement I wanted. In fact, I almost halved the original length, and it came in beautifully, with no gathers or anything. It's just that it's such large stitches that there's a lot of play in them. I think that sewing the collar on could have done the same thing, but I wanted to get it the right length before I stitched the collar.

I stitched the collar on by hand, with a doubled thread, holding the collar with the right side of the collar facing the inside of the jacket. After stitching, the collar then rolls beautifully to the outside in its proper position, rather than looking rather flat, which is what can happen.

I would recommend this pattern or something similar to anyone with a Bulky weight yarn for which they want a quickie project. Anything that knits at about 2 stitches/inch works, and the more interesting the yarn, the better.

You can see some more photos here.