Drops Design - Circular jacket / sweater

Drops Design - Circular jacket / sweater

I love this pattern!

It's finally done! It's beautiful.

I didn't follow the pattern directions though. As much as I would love to spend $4.99 or more for a skein of yarn, I'm not going to. Especially for a pattern I have never tried or worn. Would you?  Here's what I did.

The actual pattern is available from Drops Design for free and the yarn costs $76.00. That's a lot of money to spend without trying it on first. I really like the looks of this sweater from the drape to the edging. It looks dressy and casual and airy. Here's the link to the pattern.
http://www.garnstudio.com/lang/us/pattern.php?id=3315&lang=us

My adaptation for the budget conscience, try it before you spend a small fortune minded friends, is below,

I found some yarn on sale $1.00 a skein for a medium weight 4-ply (1/2 off). I loved the lacy look of the original pattern, but when I searched to see what other's had come up with the sweater looked incredible using a thicker yarn. The original pattern had gauge numbers for so many inches per circle. So....using my cheaper yarn and my favorite crochet hook, I check to see how close it was. It came up a little bit off, but after looking at this pattern closely, it didn't matter. That's right! You really can use any hook and any size yarn for this project as long as you take your body measurements first.  You have to measure around the chest,  so the finished circle will end at approximately the same measurement. Next, we measured my back and arm hole size and jotted those numbers down. The main stitch throughout is a triple crochet so it goes very fast until you get close to being done. The ruffle seems like it takes forever and ever. The size needs to be correct for your body when you reach the arm holes and again when switching over to work on the sleeves. Easy adjustments can be made to create the perfect sweater for every body type. This is a very easy pattern for all experience levels.

I used 9-Premier yarns-Eversoft 3 oz skeins and a G6 hook(4mm) to obtain the closest gauge possible.

Just before adding the sleeves, I made sure it fit or else I would have added rounds or taken rounds away. It's really cute and I'm so excited that it looks cute on Grandma.  I believe I want to try the pattern again in the future with a lighter weight yarn as this was a 4 medium. The yarn I chose for making the first one isn't going to be the same, I'll probably try alpaca, cotton, or bamboo. As far as time goes, I worked between 14-20 hours to complete this sweater.

Migrating Snow Geese, Geary County, Kansas