Or a cardigan. I really wanted something light and comfortable to wear on the long haul flight that I’ve just done, and happened to mention this to Sarah at my patternmaking class, and before I knew where I was we were into it!
As it happens, she had designed something almost exactly what I wanted for herself for a trip and I simply copied her design. Easy peasy.
Except… My fabric had a lovely selvedge and I wanted it to run round the outside of the dressing gown cardigan, but I had a little grown on collar and lapels, which meant that the front wasn’t straight. In the photo below, we cut up the side of the ruler and then round the front.
If you can follow the photos below, you can see that by cutting along the edge of the ruler, I got a separate strip which I seamed down the front edge and then coverstitched.
The top of the pockets also have the selvedge edge along them. I decided to reverse coverstitch round the pockets. I have done a tutorial for this if you are interested.
I used fabric that I bought in a Morrison sale a few months ago, which is ultra light, soft but surprisingly warm. However it has a huge amount of drape, which often translates to droop and the pockets are so large that I thought they might droop too much, so I very lightly interfaced them. I am really pleased with the result.
The photos below are taken in Queen Elizabeth Park, Vancouver, where we spent a few hours admiring the tulips, talking to the gardeners, and generally smelling the flowers and breathing the air.
No, I’m not flashing the plants, I think I was attempting to show the back and sides. In retrospect – who knows what I was doing!!
I reverse coverstitched the hem as well, but the pockets are so big that the coverstitching on them intersected with the coverstitching on the hem and it looked a bit of a mess, so I pulled it out and coverstitched the hem in the normal way. 
Part of Queen Elizabeth Park has been created from a quarry, so there is a waterfall and some lovely rockfaces. I am completely smitten with all the lichen as I love lichen.
The views over Vancouver were pretty spectacular and I couldn’t resist posing with these bronze people who were, in fact, posing for a bronze photographer. The woman on the far left has a lovely handknitted jumper on.
It was the day for parks. We also went to the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens and were blown away with the beauty of it. Both of these gardens assailed all the senses and I really wish that I could somehow reproduce the smells here.
I was quite delighted to realise that my cardigan/secret dressing gown wasn’t too unfashionable. I read a couple of articles in fashion magazines to say that they are on trend, and then I saw this one in one of my local shops (Tiger Lily). It’s so unlike me to be on trend that I became rather perturbed that in a few weeks my new “thing” will be unfashionable.
anyway, meanwhile I’m going to enjoy it. It is so comfortable and a useful extra layer. Oh, and I didn’t wear it on the plane!
I wore the cardigan for the two days we were on the Rocky Mountaineer, but this is the only photo I got (actually I got more but Mark always seemed to have hamster cheeks) – we were too busy eating and drinking I suppose!
