What do you get when you cross…(updated)

...a Bog Jacket with Tubey?

A) Booby Jacket :p

B) Tog Jacket

C) Boog Jacket

Whatever you want to call it, it looks something like this:

After finishing my ‘Broken Brocade’ a couple weeks ago I’ve been letting by brain mellow out with lots and lots of spinning. Between bouts of spinning, I worked on a prototype that would bring together two of my favorite sweater designs, the Bog Jacket from Elizabeth Zimmerman (in Knitting Around) and Tubey from Knitty.com. I love the simplicity and the innovative construction ideas of both. Most of all, I love the lack of seaming :)

The beauty of this sweater is that needs only one simple line of 3 needle bind off to finish it. This sweater served as a no-brainer project that I could do while catching up on my reading and it goes well with red wine :p

Knit one, read one...

It also serves as a prototype for my first big 100 mile fiber project that I’m going to dye, spin and knit. I’ll jabber more about that project at a later date.

For this jacket I used a cotton yarn that used to reside in this skirt:

That’s my Knitting Olympics skirt which was quite lovely but it just didn’t fall the way that I wanted it to. I only wore it a handful of times and I figured it didn’t really want to be a skirt. I wish it would have told me that before I started knitting it into a skirt. Oh well, it’s now happily a jacket.

I took the all-over construction idea of a bog jacket which basically is a rectangle cut up so it forms all the parts of shirt. It’s the basic design of the tops found worn by the famous bog people. Weavers love this design because it is simply matter of weaving up a rectangle and no part of the woven fabric is wasted.
The jacket before it's seamed up . The thumb trick has been removed and replaced with stitch holders.

I also used EZ’s thumb trick to open up the fabric to separate the front of the jacket from the sleeves. She also uses the same technique to form a neckhole. I substituted that neck shaping technique by borrowing the upper torso design construction from Tubey with a few modifications.

In Tubey, the neckline connects near the armhole. I needed the neckline to connect with the front inside edge and to also form a collar of sorts. To do that, I simply M1 by way of yarnovers every other row. I began these increases halfway through the sleeves portion of the rectangle. Once I finished the square, I also added about a dozen rows of short rows to make a semicircle to help make it fit a bit better.

The wavy inner edge is simply a matter of increased and decreases at 10 row intervals with a set of 10 regular rows in between.
My general inspiration for the look of the jacket was the result my ponderings of what a knitter in the Shire would make. Couldn’t you imagine a Hobbit lass sporting this little number?

For function, I needed a little something to throw onto myself when I’m in the garden. The cotton is machine washable and the sleeves are long enough to give me a bit of coverage but short enough to stay out of the way when I’m mucking about.

I’m calling this jacket ‘Fiddlehead’ after the fiddlehead shaped I-cord closure and it’s lovely fern color.

ETA: Thanks everyone for all your lovely comments! The Bog Jacket pattern can be found in Elizabeth Zimmerman's 'Knitting Around' and it's simply called the Bog Jacket. The thumb trick is also in that book and probably in all her other books. It's a nifty trick and I've found it to be a very useful technique for opening up the fabric for armholes, pockets and, of course, thumbs.

There is probably a knitting circle or two floating around Nanaimo. There is this Yahoo group link

Beyond the usual spontaneous and impromptu knitting circles that seem to blossom wherever I go, I belong to the Mid-Island Weavers & Spinners Guild. The members are a treasure of wisdom and inspiration and explore a whole range of textile arts beyond spinning and weaving. When I joined I was only driving a drop spindle and within a few months I was geared up with a second-hand wheel, drum carder, mountains of fleece and tribe of expert spinners that were more than happy to teach me the ropes. We meet once a month except for over the summer. If you're interested, drop a note to Eva Ryan at jbtufnail@bc.sympatico.ca or drop off a note in my comment box.

Enjoy!

Jen

Nanaimo's 100 Mile Diet Challenge