Let's call it a design feature

Back from holiday in Scotland and kind of convinced that autumn was just around the corner, I decided to make a nice bulky cardigan. You know, the kind of thing to snuggle up in on a dark evening after a cold day. Although, knowing myself and the good state of heating in my home and many other buildings, I didn't pick a particularly warm fabric. 
This stuff has been in my stash for a year or so. It's cotton and something. A thick-ish jersey with narrow white stripes on dark blue on the good side and white, blue and red in a sort of tweed effect on the reverse. It has a little bit of stretch width-wise and none at all vertically. 
If I remember correctly, I bought this fabric with this particular project in mind. It just took me a while to get around to it.

The idea was to make a cardigan with a shape based on my beloved short winter coat. 

This one. Made in 2009 and by now really past its best but still a design I love. Loose shape, only kind of fitted at the bottom, back pleat, sleeves with a square bottom edge.

For the cardigan version, I wanted it to be single breasted. And I've wanted a cardigan with a shawl collar for a while, so why not this one? It was going to be unlined, so it would have to have a different kind of pockets. And I when I bought the fabric, it was on the bolt inside out. So the wrong side caught my eye first. In thinking about sewing with it, I tried to come up with a way to incorporate it in the final look.

I could claim that is why it looks like this. But then, I would be lying. Because the stripes weren't exactly at a right angle to the selvedge, I was cutting the pattern pieces out in a single layer. I took good care to cut left and right sides of everything. I decided not to use about 10 cm of fabric closest to the edges because the stripe was particularly warped in those areas (this stripe is knitted in, by the way). And I thought about the placement of the pattern pieces to use the stripes for the best effect. I did all of that right. And then, I made a stupid mistake when cutting the last pieces. The collar facings. I cut two right. And of course, when cutting fabric, two rights make one wrong ;)
There was not enough fabric to cut a new left facing, so after some consideration, I decided to use the piece I had inside out. 

After that decision, the cardigan came together fairly. Although stripe matching, which I was trying to do, was an absolute nightmare. These stripes are almost too thin to bother with it and they are not visible on the wrong side of the fabric...
Then, I could try it on for the first time... Big disappointment. The roomy shape of the coat is sculptural and interesting. This cardigan, in its softer fabric, just looked baggy and sad. 
I was almost ready to leave it at that but, with E's input, I decided to try and save it. To do so, I sewed up the back pleat (which I love so much in the coat...) and took in some room in the torso and upper arms.

Eventually, this was the result and I think it's pretty wearable now. I ended up adding patch pockets (the bottom edge sewn on by machine from the inside, the sides sewn by hand) which show the wrong side of the fabric at their top edges. 

Picking buttons took more thought than usual as well. I wanted to use jersey snaps with an 'old red copper' finish but those didn't work. The prongs on the snaps were too short for two layers of this fabric. I wanted a look like that though. Small and kind-of-contrasting buttons somehow made for a less frumpy finish than anything larger and/or matching the blue or white. After searching both my stash and the market stall where I usually buy my snaps and buttons, I found these: Small red buttons which match the red in the wrong side of the fabric. They are the size of shirt buttons. I didn't think such tiny buttonholes would work well in the thick fabric so I sewed snaps under the buttons. I happened to have transparent plastic snaps in the exact same size as the buttons, so I used those. That little coincidence makes the improvised closure look almost intentional. 

As, there we have it. Like most wide items of clothing, the cardigan doesn't seem particularly flattering in most photographs but it is very comfortable. And I don't think it looks bad at all when worn over my LBD. In fact, it's now such a classic shape that I wouldn't be surprised if I could create looks which refer to different periods of 20th century fashion history just by wearing it with different things. I may try that one day when I feel like posing for more pictures...