Town Square in Sage

For the girls at Liberty's, this will look familiar. I was working on it the last few times I was able to make it down on Wednesday evenings. Sans buttons so far, I finally got the pattern to match up reasonably well on the sleeve seams. Honestly, I nearly lost my will to live, sewing and picking out stitches umpteen times.

The pattern is the "Town Square Jacket" by Melissa Leapman from the August-October 2005 issue of Cast On magazine (for knitters). I substituted Debbie Bliss Alpaca-Silk Aran for the acrylic yarn recommended and then reduced the size of needles from 4.5mm and 5mm to 4mm and 4.5mm.
Without the buttons, the weight of the yarn made keeping it on the hanger for this picture pretty tricky. I was almost tempted to sew loops into the shoulders like they do for dresses that slide off hangers (but then I remembered that I wouldn't be hanging this anyway). The collar isn't shown in any real detail in the magazine picture so I was a little surprised when it came out with three corners but that's what happens when you "inc 1 st at ea shoulder seam and at center back neck". Oops, I guess EOR means "every other row". Oh, well.
The sleeves look kind of long but I'm thinking that the body will stretch out a little with time...

I haven't figured out how to take close-up pictures with a flash without getting the funny little shadow at the bottom of the picture so please bear with me. Casting on the button band and button-hole band turned out to be time consuming as the right side turned out to have more rows than the left. Brendan commented that I didn't seem to be enjoying my hobby as I muttered profanities over my sixtieth (not really) cast-on.

I really loved the way this yarn took to the texture of this pattern:
Row 1 (RS): *K1, p1. Rep from * for pat.
Row 2: *K1, p1. Rep from * for pat.
Row 3 and 4: Knit.
Repeat Rows 1-4 for pat.
I'll have to remember it for future projects. Love it!

And, finally, a close-up up the three most challenging parts (after the sleeve seams) - the collar, the button-band, and the sleeve-to-body seam. Not too shabby, I think!