Hooded Jacket

Recipient: Baby Sperling
Designer: Sirdar
Pattern: Design C Jacket
Source: The Snuggly Book of Baby & Toddler Knits, book #282
Completed: July 15, 2005
Colours: White, mint and forest green
Yarn: White and mint: Zellers 100% acrylic, sportweight; forest green: Innovation 80% acrylic, 20% nylon, sportweight
Completed status: Mom mailed it around November, 2005
Pictures:

front

back

'in action'

2005-Jul-18

Done! Finished it off on Friday night and I'm very happy with it. I wish I'd had wooden buttons (I did some button browsing at last week's SnB at Lettuce Knit with this jacket in mind, but none of the wooden buttons were really small enough for the buttonholes, sad to say, because they were quite cute). But I made do with some plastic ones in a vaguely wood colour from my (admittedly meagre) button stash. I still think it looks pretty darn good.

2005-Jul-14

All the knitting is now done - I finished the last border this morning in the car. Now comes the making up. Ugh. Sewing is so not what I like about doing projects. However, it must be done. I may not finish tonight, but before the work week is out I expect I will have a finished jacket.

2005-Jul-12

The hood is now complete. I have just the front borders to knit and then I can start sewing it all together.

If you hate balloons, I apologize. However, I do not have any kind of head-only mannequin in my possession, so this was the closest thing I could find. My other choice was my daughter's Raggedy Anne doll, whose head is extremely flat. I felt the balloon would show off the hood better. Live with it. I have a terrified hatred of shrinking balloons and this one LIVES IN MY HOUSE AND I FREAKIN' HAVE TO TOUCH IT ALL THE TIME JUST BECAUSE MY DAUGHTER LOVES IT.

Ahem. Sorry.

So...if I can take living with this ever-shrinking balloon, surely you can stand just looking at this picture, secure in the knowledge that the balloon is far away from you and is partly covered with a hood anyway. Suck it up. :)

2005-Jul-9

Right side of the hood is done, and the left side of the hood is over halfway completed.

2005-Jul-4

Work on this has been slow while I concentrate on finishing the blanket instead. Right side of the hood is about an inch or so away from being complete.

2005-Jun-30

I didn't work on this at all yesterday because I wanted to forge ahead on the Mountain Laurel Counterpane blanket project. However, the blanket project has reached a stage where I cannot work on it while standing up. This means that if I don't get a seat on the subway, no knitting gets done if I've got the blanket project in my bag. Yesterday was a case in point - I was unable to snag a seat for the majority of my subway commute back and forth. Wasted knitting time is an evil that I simply cannot allow to continue. Therefore, even though I'm behind on the blanket project, I had to bring the hooded jacket project on the subway with me today so that I would be able to knit even if I couldn't get a seat. I've started the right side of the hood.

2005-Jun-28

I finished the second sleeve last night, six days ahead of schedule. At least something is going right. Next up: the hood.

2005-Jun-27

Here is the completed first sleeve, next to the in-progress second sleeve. (Thus proving that I really am on sleeve #2 and not just recycling a shot of sleeve #1). I am in excellent shape, about five/six days ahead of schedule. Rah.

2005-Jun-24

As promised, here's what the fronts look like

I've also made a little bit of progress on the first sleeve:

It would be bigger than this, but I screwed up last night. I finished the moss stitch cuff and eagerly started zooming through the pattern without reading the very clearly stated instructions to start increasing on the fifth and every following fourth row. (Really, Kathleen? Increasing on a sleeve? What a novel freakin' concept. Moron.) So I had to frog back to the first increase row and start again. With any luck I will make better progress tonight. And I think I should make an effort to read the instructions for this pattern a little more carefully from now on, since this sleeve fiasco is the second time I ignored instructions and paid the consequences.

2005-Jun-23

Last night I finished the right front and fixed the left front. Both fronts are now done, four days ahead of schedule. (Pictures of the fronts - with neck shaping in the right spots - will hopefully be forthcoming tomorrow.) I'm now working on sleeve #1. I'm really hoping to keep up this ahead-of-schedule trend with this project so that I can snag some extra time for all the Christmas projects I have to do.

2005-Jun-22

Picture time. The back of the jacket looks like this:

The right front (currently in progress) looks like this:

And the screwed-up left front looks like this:

Man, that's embarrassing. However, as you can see, the right front is very close to being done - I'm two rows away from being able to start the neck shaping, which I will make absolutely sure is done on the correct side.

2005-Jun-21

I didn't get a lot of time to work on this last night, but I did manage to reach my goal of having one-third of the right front done. For now, I am ignoring the fact that the left front has the neck shaping on the wrong side. I would like to successfully finish the right front before I start to fix that - then I would at least have some sense of accomplishment before facing my own stupidity. Stay tuned - I'm hoping to have pictures for tomorrow's blog entry.

2005-Jun-20

DD really made up for Saturday's lack of sleep yesterday by indulging in a four hour nap. Yes, you read that right. Four. Freakin'. Hours. In fact, it was closer to four and a half hours. Unbelievable. DH and I were greatly relieved, because what with no nap and going to bed really late on Saturday, she was so tired Saturday night that she kept waking herself up and getting really upset. Like, completely-hysterical-sobbing-for-no-good-reason kind of upset. Heartbreaking stuff. I finally had to take her into the spare bedroom and sleep with her so that she would stay asleep without freaking out. Anyway, the point of all this rambling is that her massive nap gave me loads of time (after I took my own nap of recovery, of course) to work on this project. And I gotta say - this is one freakishly quick knit. I completed the left front and got a good start on the right front. All was going so well until I took some time to admire the completed left front and noticed that the button band and the neck shaping were on opposite sides. How genius am I. In horror, I re-checked the instructions and realised that I had started the neck shaping with the right side facing instead of (as the instructions clearly stated) the wrong side. Moron. Fortunately, it will be an extremely simple and non-time-consuming matter to frog it back to the beginning of the neck shaping and re-knit, but it's the principle of the thing, y'know? If it weren't for the fact that I am way ahead of schedule on this project, I'd be totally disgusted with myself. But since it's otherwise going really well, there's just a little bit of disgust.

2005-May-24

Susan was quite reassuring in the comments that a 19.5" chest would do just fine for a six month old. I still have my doubts, since I am a) paranoid and b) the parent of a two year old (which means that all baby size clothes now look ridiculously tiny to my eyes). Perhaps I should get out some of the tops that fit my daughter when she was 6-9 months old and compare. However, I am scared to do this, because if the size I'm making is too small, pulling out the old clothes will prove it, and I have gone way too far into this project (which looks really great) to be able to frog it without making the lives of those around me miserable with my swearing and complaining. The back is finished and I'm a few inches into the left front.

2005-May-22

I hunted through my collection of baby patterns and came up with a very sweet little hooded jacket from a Sirdar booklet. I started making it in the third size (6-9 months) because the baby is going to be born just as the summer heat hits (yes, the baby is due end of November, but since the family is in Australia I have to take the reversal of seasons into account), so 6-9 months is right when warmer clothing will start to be needed. But I was only about six rows into it when I realised the thing would probably be big enough to fit my two year old. I checked the pattern for the finished measurements, and they are pretty darn generous. So I'm going with the 0-3 month size instead, which will give me a finished chest of about 19.5". That'll fit a six month old, right? RIGHT? Someone reassure me here? I've already knit about 9" on the back already and I don't want to frog.

2005-May-18

My dad forwarded me an email from his SIL - I have a cousin expecting baby #2 at the end of November! Naturally I couldn't let such a thing go by without knitting something for the wee one. I'm not sure what I'm going to make, but I don't think I will be designing something. I'll probably just go hunting through my pattern collection for something I like but have never gotten the chance to do before.