Tuesday, November 13, 2012

F.O.: Eagle Jacket

He's 6!! And I finally finished his birthday sweater! Last year after I finished knitting a shawl collar pullover sweater for my oldest son, he requested that I knit him a sweater that has a zipper on it. No problem! I have had my eye on this pattern for a long time and I was just waiting for him to be the right size to knit it.

Pattern: Eagle Jacket by Debbie Bliss in the book 9 to 5

Yarn: Patons Classic Wool in Charcoal, Black, and White

Needles: size US 7 & 8

I absolutely love this! It is one of the only Cowichan style sweaters that I have seen for kids. The pattern was easy - I was a little bit wary of doing stranded knitting on the purl side but it was easier than I thought it would be. The yarn is great also - a 100% wool in just the right colors.
I wasn't really sure how to go about installing the zipper. I found two methods - one was to use a hook to pull loops of yarn through the zipper tape so that you could knit the zipper onto the sweater and the other method was to just sew it on with a needle and thread. Neither method would work perfectly for this sweater so I used a hybrid of the two methods. I found a very large, very sharp needle in my sewing box (which I have no idea what I used it for previously?!?) with an eye large enough to pass yarn through and I chain stitched the zipper in place with the yarn. Really the only difficult thing I found with knitting this sweater was all of the ends that needed weaving in. I tried to do that as I went along so that I wouldn't be stuck with doing it all at the end but it was still tedious. A small price to pay for such a wonderful sweater!

2 comments:

AnnaPrasad said...

What an amazing sweater, amazing! And are those your other boys in the background? Too cute :-).

Anonymous said...

So cute! And he wears it well. What a handsome young man :)