Ridiculously excited to have found the Bog Jacket because I’ve been studying peatland birds for 15 years and spend too much time in bogs and nothing makes me happier than combining nerd biology passions with nerd knitting passions. I have wanted to try to make a jacket and lightly felt it for the longest time, and EZ’s bog jacket seems like the perfect place to try. Have extensive notes in excel that I need to transfer here but my plan is to make it big and FELT it, woohoo!
Swatched with Cascade Eco with both garter and stockinette and stockinette is much easier to control in the felting process and makes a nicer fabric so I’m going with that. Also made an experimental barbie sized bog jacket so I could understand the construction.
Gauge in stockinette was 15 st x 20 rows in 4in square, size 9 needle.
Yarn wound (Cascade Eco+ in Lichen), time to CO. Going for a 44in circumference based on a jacket I have that I like and based on the fact that in my experiments here and in the past, stockinette shrinks in length during felting but not much at all in width.
CO 165 st 8/27/18
08-27-2018
addendum, CO 168 so it is divisible by 4, and allow for potential of some width-wise shrinking.
Stupidly did not measure the length before I felted it but it behaved like the swatch did and shrunk a lot in length but not in width. I did note somewhere that the length up to the thumb trick part was 21in, before I felted it.
I added 20 st to each sleeve for extra length. This was all sort of guesswork because it was stockinette and I was planning to felt it but I wanted to get to about a 12in circumference, post felting, at the cuff. I used short rows about every 4th row to create the taper, then did about 33 rows straight, added the neck (I did 30 st for the neck), another 33 rows straight and then tapered back down by casting off stitches every 4th row to mirror the short rows. I did not do the shoulder shaping, I did add the pockets (SO COOL what a neat method), did the collar and the icord edge all around.
I had in my head beforehand the idea of doing something across the chest to hide the grafted stitches because they were sort of messy in stockinette but after felting you can’t really see them much. Nevertheless by that point I was obsessed with some kind of embellishment which ended up being a rusty blackbird because every bog jacket needs the best bog bird right? I did the bird by cutting a silhouette from black felt and sewing it on and then needle felting some alpaca fleece I got from my neighbor on top of it, plus the yellow eye with spindrift I had from another project.
I bought some pretty Celtic looking clasps I was going to use but no matter how many times I tried sewing them on they just did not hang right and would fall open, I think this was the wrong use for them. Found a zipper instead which was also a new endeavor for me but I love it.
Felted it in a pot with water that I heated on the stove. It actually went really quick and came out just fine. It’s so cozy I don’t think I can take it off til spring.
01-10-2021
Added photo from when I actually took my bog jacket to bog camp this summer and wore it in a bog while we did our fieldwork 
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