I offered to design and knit my daughter a nice chunky jacket in the cold winter months we had at the end of last year.

I measured a cardy / top that was the measurements she wanted the one I was going to knit to come out at.  She couldn’t decide how she wanted it to look – so I got on with a plain st-st back.

We had a trip to our local Matalan when they had just had a big delivery of different knitted cardies and jackets.

My daughter liked a double breasted duffle coat type front off one jacket and the cable on another.  I drew a quick sketch of the design we were going with.

As you can see from the bottom left hand corner I had already working my test square and knew how many stitches I needed and had calculated how many stitches I needed for the back and how many for the cabled sides.

I knitted the two cabled sides.

I put the pockets in the cable parts of the sides.

I measured my daughters wrist and how deep she wanted the sleeve when it was set in the jacket. I used the back of my drawing to calculate the amount of stitches I would need to start with, finish with and how I was going to evenly increase the stitches over the full length I needed to knit the sleeve.

The sleeve came out like this.

I sewed the back and fronts together at the shoulders and picked stitches up evenly along the right front, round the back of the neck and back down the left side.  Then knitted a double rib border, made the cords for the duffle attachments from twisted wool for the jacket.

Because the border was knitted all the way round the collar was the same width to make a high collar to keep my daughters neck warm.

I hope you like the design.