A Circular Crochet Coat

I just realised that I haven't blogged any of my knitting or crochet projects for a while.  I have finished a number of things over the last couple of months.

Starting with my sisters coat.

At the beginning of August my sister asked if - for her 40th Birthday present - I would make her a crocheted coat.  She had a couple of pictures of things that she liked but none of them were perfect - she wanted a bit of this and a bit of that.  That's entirely the sort of thing I love doing so of course I said yes.

The pictures she sent me of basically what she wanted was this.

She wanted something about the weight and design of the first picture, with the colour and ruffles of the second set of pictures.

These were both crochet patterns but the first one was toddler size and in Russian, the second was too light weight, without sleeves and in German.

I decided to start with the first pattern and spent a night trying to translate the pattern from Russian into English.  Luckily about a week earlier I'd done a similar translation for a friend in my knitting group when her daughter asked her to crochet her something using a Russian pattern so this second translation wasn't quite so hard.

I then made up a toddler sized version with the same type of yarn as I was planning on using just to check that this what what my sister wanted.

This got the go ahead so I went out and bought the wool.  My sister wanted something that would be easily washable but still warm and snuggly.  I've used the Caron simply soft acrylic yarns before and liked them, and they come in great colours so this is what I got.

And so I started crocheting around in circles.  I used the basic increase patterns as set up by the toddler coat and kept working until it got to the point where the mesurement across the top third of the circle was the same as my sister measurement from shoulder to shoulder.  At this point I created a hole on each side for the armholes and then kept crocheting around until it was wide enough across to wrap right around.

I then went back to the armholes and crocheted sleeves in the round, tapering them slightly as I went.

In order to finish off the coat I went back to the pattern for the second inspiration picture and found the chart for the ruffle.  After translating it from German I them modified it slightly to fit the number of stitches that I had and then worked around the coat in this pattern for another 8 rows.

I used a 3 row version of the ruffle to finish off each sleeve and the coat was done.

To close the coat I wanted to find a shawl pin.  I asked around my kitting groups and one girl mentioned that she's seen them at a knitting shop about an hours drive away so I took a trip out there and found a beautiful pin that matched the coat nicely.