In the middle of winter I decided to make this hoody.
I went with the smallest size, 36. I actually planned really hard on this, to get a mix of fabrics that I envisioned in my head. However that turned it into a challenging project because the different weights of the media caused some drama. And in fact, I started to move house, and this went into a corner for six months. Here we are midsummer and it's done!!
The fabrics are from The Fabric Store. They are a heavyweight liberty sweatshirting, some lightweight black rayon knit and some black sweatshirt knit which is so cuddly. In retrospect? I should have done the whole thing in the cozy sweatshirt stuff. Lesson learned. I actually Really Do Not Like the Liberty. It has a weird cardboardy feel, doesn't stretch much, and the design actually bothers me. Obviously things can seem great in the shop and just not so great at home, c'est la vie.
There are various tricks with this - in the beginning the pieces aren't obvious because of their strange shape. You have to pay attention to which side of the sleeve is what, but once a few pieces are together it isn't too complicated. I had trouble at the three way intersection of the body, the sort of hidden pocket, which is under the body, and the side piece. That's partly because the weight of my fabrics was so different. There were little holes I had to go and overlock shut after the fact. I recommend using a stable sweatshirting fabric for this to make it easy to sew. I also double layered the hood because I was using a really lightweight fabric. I used self fabric bindings and they were insanely floppy. I think I understand now that the instructions provide you a really long binding piece for you to put elastic into. I bought some actual rib, and I think my piece was 2/3 of the length of the pattern piece to get enough actual pull in of the sweatshirt.
The instructions are good enough, but they are not excessive. It's not a difficult project overall but I do recommend working through it slowly due to the unique construction. I don't recommend very loose or floppy fabrics since it's already a very loose and floppy thing.
In the end I'm happy it's done, and I actually really like the concept. I think to make this work I would need to use a single colour and keep it simple. I will probably source some cuddly, easy to work with sweatshirting to do it for next winter.
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