This past year, the first Noro magazine was published. As you might expect, it’s full of wonderful patterns that show the colours of Noro yarn to great advantage. I had to get a copy when I saw this jacket, the cropped jacket by Irina Poludnenko. This link for the jacket is a Ravelry link.

It’s a very clever piece of business, using short row in garter stitch to tailor the jacket. It also uses two colours of Noro Silk Garden Sock, so you get that wonderful alternating stripe thing going on. That’s really striking in Noro yarns because they self-stripe, so the striping pattern is constantly in transition. The jacket  is cropped and fitted, with a shawl collar and long sleeves.

Here’s the left front of mine:

This is the left front, so the edge on your left is at the centre front, then forms the collar. The edge on your right is the side seam. The notch at the top is where the collar of the front meets the collar of the back and the shoulder seam is beside it. The stitches on the stitch holder are the front side of the shoulder seam – even though the instructions say to cast off this edge, I left the stitches live so that I can simply pick them up along with the back shoulder stitches and keep knitting. After the fronts are done, the back is knit side to side, then the shoulder seams joined. The sleeves are then knitted down from the shoulder to the wrist, and the side seam – from wrist to waist – joined last. I thought it would be better to eliminate that shoulder seam. The two colourways I’m using are 289 for the main colour and 313 for the contrast. Of course – because I’m fussy like that – I rewound the yarn so that the colours in the right front will mirror the left one. I’m deciding how fussy I’ll be about matching the backs and sides – you can see that I didn’t cut the yarn at the shoulder, just in case.

Self-striping yarns are always addictive to knit – using two colourways at once seems to be even more so! I’m really enjoying this knit.