I've got another one of those ideas...

... that just has to be made.

It all started with an awful bit of purple fleece fabric that was gifted to me, along with some off white fleece knit that I used in my Roller Skate Flip.

As an aside I salvaged the too small sleeves from that dress and cut the rest of the Sailboat top to match. I let A choose the buttons in the hope that she'd like the top if she'd chosen the buttons. I made the top, she screamed at it, I got cross enough that I just shoved her into it and we went out for the day, with her plucking at it and carrying on as if it were made of burning hot prickles for the first 10 mins. After that she wore it happily and it's now a favourite and in high rotation. Maybe I should dress her more forcefully more often. :)

I decided the purple fleece would be perfect for a jumper (you might say sweater, sweatshirt or something else altogether) for A with a particular print on the front. She declared the print "too scary" and said she'd rather an aeroplane.

The whole point of the exercise was this particular design, so the purple aeroplane jumper will be for another day. Not to be thwarted, I ran the idea past P who said it would be cool, but not in that icky purple colour. It would have to be green. OK, but that meant buying more fabric. oh well, I can manage that...

So now I just needed to create the perfect jumper to paint my design on.

The style I want is a round neck, loose-ish fit with ribbed cuffs and waistband, a bit like this lovely example circa 1980-something.

I can't bring myself to pay for a pattern on Ebay that I feel I should be able to find in garage sale. Or better, I'll happily pay for one that could be adapted and is from a modern, independent designer and I can download it.

The two patterns that I already have that are somewhat similar are the Flashback Skinny T and the Oliver + S Field Trip. Both of them are really far too slim fitting for what I want but since I had the Field trip pattern out after making A's pants I thought I'd try upsizing that.

I cut a size 7 width to make up for the fleece having almost no stretch, and kept the length at size 5. My plan had been to cut the neck band almost twice as wide as the pattern suggests to try and get more of a ribbed cuff neck look. Then I was gong to add ribbing at the cuffs and the bottom hem. However my perfectly colour matched leftover ribbing from Spotlight is awful. It stretches, a lot, but has no real memory and just looks awful as trim.

I should have taken a photo of the neckband as it was when I first attached it as it was truly disastrous. My salvage was to fold it in half (back to the original pattern's width) and then stitch it down using the double needle. that actually worked quite well. But it wasn't looking at all like the sweater I wanted, so I just finished the sleeves and hem with the double needle.

So here's another fleece top I hadn't planned to make, that I'm not going to paint a design on, but which P wanted to wear immediately and has hardly taken off since. Score I guess.

Now, if anyone can recommend a good pattern that is either what I'm looking for or could be adapted somewhat (eg a hoodie without the hood) and please, do you know where the good quality, thicker ribbing for cuffs can be found?....