Kid's Choice

So I've been venturing into the thrift store every few weeks over the summer, acknowledging that the kiddo is not as enthused about the activity as I am.  I make the deal: we'll only look at toys and cloth.  Toys he's fine with, but, cloth?  Enh.

So I was surprised when he fell in love with a yard of fluffy polar fleece, a camo print in colors I think of as "spring thaw."  I said I'd make a hoodie for him, thinking I had a separating zipper of appropriate length, which...no.  I'd intended to use Burda 9672 again, anyway, so I asked him if he'd rather have a jacket or a pullover, and he chose the pullover, also choosing a yellow zipper.

It went together pretty fast, except for the part that involved unpicking stitches in fluffy cloth...

 See why I think of it as "spring thaw" colors?  Snow white and ice blue and...wet mud brown.  Looks like springtime to me.

Aesthetically, I would have preferred a chunkier zipper, but I'm not unhappy with the color choice here at all--going with the spring theme, we can think of this as the first daffodils...

The bit of ribbon is purely decorative--not covering up any mistakes at all, honest!  Although...in retrospect...if I'd known I was going to add that detail, I might've cut the front on the fold and installed the zipper in a slash, knowing I'd have the ribbon to cover up how it would've been inevitably botched...

It's not like I followed the directions on this in any other way, after all.  (I mean...hey.  It's me.)   I did look at the instruction sheet, and, when I saw that it was telling me to install the zipper last...well...pfft, no.  Zipper first. (Well, yeah, center front seam first, then zipper, but...you know...that's still more 'first' than the instructions called for.)  And, as usual, top stitching everywhere.

(Always moving.)

I cut the pieces in size 10, despite the fact that the kiddo is still approaching his eighth birthday, but he's a lanky slouchy 8, so the test fit of this was just fine...except for the sleeves.

He greatly enjoyed the longer sleeves, but I told him it would be a detriment to doing anything but pretending to be a Minecraft Villager (as he's doing in this photo), so I picked the original stitching out (which is a kinda...unpleasant...process on this cloth) and re-sewed them with deeper hems (which hid the damage done in the course of unpicking of the original hem stitching, yay.)  And, as demonstrated, he can still do Villager hands, so he's happy.

I completely ignored anything like a layout diagram for the pattern pieces--it's not easy to even find the pattern layout diagrams for this pattern--and started folding the cloth just enough to cut out each successive piece, with the front, back, and sleeves in the first 'row,' and the hood and band in the remaining yardage.  I still have a solid 8" x 40" strip of the cloth left, after using one yard of 60" for a pattern that calls for 1¼ yards for this size.  And, yes, naps were observed.  I am proud of that, thank you.

This is a relatively fast pattern, with completely hassle-free sleeve cap and armscye fit (and not just because knits're stretchy--this is the third time I've made something from this pattern, and the first time I've made that something from a knit, and the sleeves went on just as beautifully when I used the wovens...and improvised linings...and underlays...)

So, now it's just time to wait for the weather to stop having a heat index over 100°.