Pink Princess Jacket

Happy 4th Birthday to Pink Saturday at How Sweet the Sound, the only blog party I join in with! Be sure to check out all the pretty things posted at this blog party. Four years and going strong! Here's a link to the jacket on Ravelry, which has a link to the free pattern. The hat is my own pattern and is available for free here on this blog.

I had my doubts about these colours when they arrived from Bendigo, but I had promised my friend two shades of pink and now its together I'm more convinced that they do actually work. I'm looking forward to seeing a photo of this jacket being worn by the baby girl so I can check my sizing. Making sure this is the right size is my main doubt now, although I do think it will fit!

Pink Princess Jacket with contrasting hat, size 00

To make sure it was a size 00, I lay down all of my son's size 00 clothes on top of it to check. There is quite a bit of variance in the sizes of baby clothes, so this jacket is on the larger of size 00. I think too small is a greater sin than too large as it can always be grown into. This is also what I call my lifetime jacket design. My lifetime jackets can be enlarged and worn for many years, by simply removing the contrasting trim and three seams. I plan to enlarge the blue winter jacket I made for my son for Easter as he has already grown, so I can demonstrate what I mean by my lifetime jacket design. But my first priority now is to finish my custom orders, of which this set is one.

So to make this size 00 jacket, I used a 4mm hook and 8ply luxury wool from Bendigo Woollen Mill.I started by I making two 11 round hexagons, each hexagon has an extension of 5 rows on one side to form the extended sleeves, then they are fastened off. Then the 3 sides that form the centre and bottom were extended by one row then fastened off. Then the top of the sleeves were joined with invisible joins leaving 5 clusters each side for the neck, and 5 clusters at the wrists to form cuffs. I then joined the back seam with another invisible join. Finally the jacket was edged in a contrasting colour using sc along the neck and front, and scallops of 5 dc at the base. The wrists were also edged with scallops, except for the 5 cluster gap which was edged in sc.

I took my project to craft class and my crochet teacher suggested to put ties at the wrists to make a better fit. I've made the size large so the sleeves could be too big, so these ties will keep it on more nicely if that is the case. My crochet teacher also suggested I make ch sl st ties, instead of ch sc, which I did and they turned out very nicely. Another suggestion my crochet teacher made was to put more stitches in the corners so they don't curve up as much, which I also tried to do.

I made a matching hat for this jacket, which will have its own post as this one is too long. On both hat and jacket I put a contrasting flower, how cute!