I hope you’re all having a nice Christmas holiday! This is the first of two posts where I can finally show you what I made my niece and nephew for Christmas, now that they’ve received their gifts and my dad has very kindly taken some photos for us (in my opinion, he’s outdone himself here!).
I started thinking about this gift in October, when my parents were visiting London. We talked about what to make for my nephew Logan, who’s eleven, but there are hardly any patterns out there for tween (or teen) boys that aren’t that same, freaking button-down shirt (I think I could wallpaper the boat in copies of that button-down shirt pattern – news to pattern producers – try harder! ) !
My mom suggested Logan might like another hoodie, so I found one with great lines over at Lekala, so I just entered in his measurements and voila, a pdf pattern arrived, made to fit. (FYI, Lekala have a new, more user-friendly site so if you were confused with the ordering system on the original site, you might want to give the new site a try!)
I used Lekala 7160 (which isn’t on the new site yet) – a sweatshirt with yoke, dropped shoulder, three-piece hood, upper centre front zipper, and topstitched, in-seam pockets.
I normally buy my sweatshirting from Pennine Outdoor, but I was also buying for my mom and we wanted a bigger colour selection so we ended up buying the “Royal blue” sweatshirting from Josery, a new-to-me, UK-made textile mill. I’ll definitely be using more of their fabrics in future, as they’ve got a massive colour selection and a ton of ribbed knit to match their sweatshirting, too. I already had some black ribbing and black sweatshirting scraps on hand so I used them here as accents.
Big, big thanks for my Dad for taking Logan out on a mini fishing trip and taking these photos in a nice, relaxed environment!
Over the phone, my mom was concerned that the sweatshirt fits him perfectly right now (as you’d expect from a made-to-measure pattern, really!), and that she should’ve told me to make it a few sizes bigger. My feeling is that it fits him now, winter is here now, so if he loves it and wears it for one winter only, then that’s better than him not wearing it because it was too big, or because it only fit him when it happened to be summer!
I also took some rushed photos of it before I posted it off to America, but this was when I was in the depths of flu (rushing to make and post it before the Last Post date!), so I’m glad we’ve got the nicer ones above to show off!
Srprisingly, I’ve never sewn these sort of in-seam pockets before where there’s only one pocket piece per side, and then you topstitch around the pocket edge so that the front of the garment becomes the other side of the pocket:
Since Lekala garments are designed in Russia, the instructions are sometimes cryptic, so I usually look at them only to make sure I’m using the right type of fabric, and then come up with my own way of constructing it. It’s like my own personal puzzle, and one of my favourite aspects of sewing!
Since I wrote them down anyway, you might as well see them, too, in case you’d also like to make a hoodie for a boy in your life!
My own Order of construction:
- Construct hood & finish opening edge (the notched edge is the neck edge CB)
- Attach zipper to CF front yoke & facings
- Sew shoulder seams
- Sew facing shoulder seams
- Place the hood onto the neckline, right sides facing. Place the facing on top of the hood, matching notches to CB & aligning shoulder seams
- Sew neckline edge, then under stitch facing
- Sew pocket linings to backs between notches, right sides facing
- Fold in seam allowances on lower fronts between pocket opening notches and coverstitch
- Sew front yoke seam, treating the front facing as one with the front
- Attach sleeves at shoulders
- Sew side seams & sleeve seams in one go, placing pockets onto fronts and taking care not to close the pocket openings
- Topstitch the pockets closed on the lower fronts
- Hem the bottom & sleeves
- Tack the facings at the shoulders where necessary
And do you know the greatest thing about a hoodie? You’re protected against unexpected rain showers!
Since I constructed this entirely in December, I’ll also be entering this in Pattern Review’s “Sewing for Children” contest!