ASJ Pockets Progress

Our trip to the wool festival the other weekend inspired me to haul my Adult Surprise Jacket out and work on the pockets.

It was a combination of being surrounded by all that wool and knowing that if the pockets had done I could have worn it to the fair.

Well, maybe not as it was threatening to rain on Saturday and did rain on Sunday so a rain coat was the way to go...but the potential had been there.

I'm going with the construction EZ gives in the pattern for an afterthought pocket. On the right you see the flap for the first pocket knit and waiting to be sewn down. On the left I'm working on picking up the stitches for the second pocket.

This method requires cutting the fabric of the finished sweater, which might give you some insight into why I've been dragging my feet.

When I settled down to do the task it wasn't as bad as I expected. Perhaps I had selected a "sticky" section of yarn to place the pocket because all hell did not break loose when I snipped the strand.

I was able to carefully pluck the yarn out of the stitches while placing the newly live stitches on double pointed needles.

There was a false start because I messed up the increases she recommends, which can only be expected when you knit while watching TV. When I saw the pocket was going sideways I just ripped it out and worked increases at the beginning and end of every knit row. Heck, it's a pocket. No one should be looking at it.

I knit the first pocket to be about a deep as my iPhone is long on the assumption that I will mainly be dropping my iPhone in it. Also, that should be a good depth for a curled up hand. Actually, any longer and it would have gotten dangerously close to the bottom of the sweater.

You will note I typed "the first pocket." The second pocket is still in the state you see it in the picture. Which is to say a state of potentiality waiting for the rest of the stitches to be picked up and knit. I seem to remember we were watching something good on TV and the stitch transfer was too fiddly so I put it aside.

I really should finish it. But today the temperature has jumped up into the mid-70s F. Not really sweater weather. Did you hear that rushing sound my motivation made as it went by?