The Pearl Buck Swing Jacket is a wonderful design — simple and classic. It comes together easily, and requires only a bit of care when blocking and piecing together to look very elegant.
The Jaeger Extrafine Merino is beautifully soft on my skin. The elderberry color is lovely, too, full of depth and drama — it looks rather more purple in some lights, but usually tends more towards the burgundy with purply-blue undertones.
(Julia, who is usually so camera-shy that she is pouting in all of her school pictures this year, decided that this time she did want her photo taken, and so she refused to move out of range, and in fact climbed into my lap for quite some time.)
The pleat at the back is the most unusual thing about this jacket, but the half-diamond edging at the front and the back yoke worked from side to side are also subtle but interesting details.
I made a minor adjustment to the length of the sleeves as follows: in the first decrease section (at the lower arm), instead of 11 plain rows between the decrease rows, I worked 13, giving a total of 14 rows for the shaping, worked 5 times altogether. At the "continue even" section just before the beginning of the cap shaping, I worked 12 rows straight, and the piece measured 11 1/4 in. instead of 10 1/4 in. as given. This kept the stitch count on the needle the same as in the instructions, but added about an inch to the length. I could just as easily have worked an extra inch straight at that last section before the start of the cap shaping, but this would have made the bell-shape end lower down, and I wanted to extend it closer to the elbow. (The bell-ness does not show much after blocking.) If I’d thought about it ahead of time, I might have added an extra inch to the length of the body, so that the sleeve/body proportions would have been the same as in the original — as it is now, after I lengthened it, the sleeve is just a smidge shorter than the body, and would look a bit better if it was about two inches. This is a minor quibble, though!
It is also very comfortable, partly from the lovely merino, but also the shaping and fit. Ten out of ten!
A Bluestocking Knits 
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