FO Friday

Look! LOOK! Finally, I have an FO to get off my damned sidebar. If only I were like the inimitable Aileen and could promise you an FO a week (except that, to my tender ears, that sounds much more as though I were promising you a fuck-off every week instead of a decorous and ladylike knitted garment. Who makes up these abbreviations, anyway?)

But after a year on the needles, I present, FINALLY:

FO: Debbie Bliss tweed biker jacket

Pattern: Debbie Bliss biker jacket, from the tweed collection (capital letters not included: this is a high-end English product, and capital letters appear to have been banned for all aspirational brands across the water.)

Yarn: Vintage Sunbeam Lux Tweed Canterbury alpaca/tweed aran mix, 500g; cuffs, collar and waistband knitted in Tivoli luxury aran tweed, 50% wool, 21% acrylic, 20% alpaca, 9% viscose, 100g. SO soft and snuggly, all of it. Here's the vintage yarn pre-knitting: the colour of it is truer here than in the first photo.

Needles: 5 mm circular for the body, 5 1/2 for the bands

Pattern modifications: Apart from not using the recommended yarn? But since when do I do that? I grafted the shoulder seams instead of sewing them up. And I am never sewing shoulder seams again, what's more.

Time sucked: Mensch, who can tell? I'm a year from cast-on to sewing on the last popper, but how long in total? I think knitting the pieces didn't take too long, back in the mists of last winter, but who remembers that far back?

Verdict

Oh my GOD, do I ever have a verdict! So much so, that you get BULLET POINTS...

• Yarn: the yarns are gorgeous. Absolutely amazing. Much, much nicer that the Debbie Bliss tweed, which has no alpaca and therefore is not half as fluffy. This Sunbeam stuff knits up into a really solid, cosy fabric, which makes the jacket much more structured, rather than a cardigan. Which is perfect, really. Look, here are the real colours again, even if the photo is silly and blurry:

• Pattern: NEVER, NEVER AGAIN. This is a commercial pattern from one of the biggest brands in British knitting, right? Then why the hell is it so hard to provide a schematic? There is none. None at all. And the finished measurements listed aren't at all sufficent to draw up your own.
  
  More, the finishing instructions were minimal. The sleeves ended up larger than the holes for them; my lovely lady friend, who is a tailor, informed me (through my tears of rage and fury) that this is standard for jackets, and that I had to gather the extra fabric in at the top of the armhole. Then, elsewhere on the net, I read that some people sewed the extra fabric along the body seams. Again, who can tell? I am not convinced about the sleeves as they are, I have to say. But then, it is a biker jacket, isn't it? they are supposed to be bomber shape, and funnily enough, this is precisely the season of the bell, billowing or slim sleeve, but most definitely not bomber jacket shape.



• Overall: It's a biker jacket! In fluffy purple tweed! It's butch! It's femme! It's a classic! It's utterly square and hopelessly out of fashion! It fits perfectly around the body! It fits weirdly around the arms! It's a gorgeous dense fabric! It's particoloured! It's... oh, I dunno. It's finished. The proof will be in the wearing, right?