I bought this beautiful grey ponte in Melbourne years ago, from Astratex I think, and I planned to make trousers, but changed my mind as it’s a bit light-weight and instead decided to make a cropped moto-style jacket.

I began with my hacked Itch-to-Stitch Lisbon cardigan pattern (and another here), so I thought I would do a bit more hackery and see if I could add and subtract to make a simple moto.

I had a design in mind – I wanted the asymmetrical zip, a hood, cropped body and the classic triangular piece under the zip. Oh, and I wanted pockets!

I didn’t have a huge amount of material so made the three-quarter length sleeve version, which wouldn’t be my first choice, but thought they would be good trans-seasonal sleeves as this jacket is quite light-weight. I also doubled the width of the band at the bottom. This is basically the view that I started with.

And this is one of my previous versions, which I have worn to death, and am even wearing it as I write this!

The one above has a straight zip which veers off towards the top, whereas I tweaked the fronts of this new version to have the zip running slightly diagonally from the bottom. I managed to copy the pattern back to front which means that the zip on the new one goes from left to right instead of right to left.

In spite of the cold weather I managed to get quite a bit of wear out of this little jacket by teaming it with something warmish underneath and wearing a scarf. In this case I have a an Astoria under it with a divine eco-printed silk scarf which was a gift from my friend Sophie.

You can just see the pockets. I decided to do little welt pockets as I thought they would be less obvious, but the jacket is so short that the pockets finished up right at my bust level. Needless to say I don’t put my hands in them very often!

I took the hood pattern from the Stylish Wraps book, which is a Japanese Sewing book, using this hooded stole as the basic pattern. I modified it a bit as the hood was too big.

I realise that I haven’t taken a photo of the hood in use, but perhaps that’s because I haven’t worn it on my head yet.

It looks good with my Itch-to-Stitch Mountain View jeans, but I absolutely love it with my Sanderson Linen pencil skirt.

I added a triangle to the inside of the zip using a self-drafted pattern piece as a facing. It isn’t very obvious when the jacket is zipped up.

So here it is in better light

This is an easy to wear little jacket and it pleases me that it so useful and goes with many of my tops and bottoms.

I bought the zip in Hong Kong with no particular project in mind, I just thought it might be useful, and the final length of the jacket was determined by the zip length, although it was almost exactly the length I wanted.

I think it’s safe to say that this is no longer the Lisbon cardigan, but I did use the basic pattern pieces to create this little jacket so am claiming it as a hack.