I first pinned the Julia Cardigan on Pinterest months ago.  I’d seen it around Pinterest and the blogosphere, specifically on Scruffy Badger, and Notes From A Mad Housewife, among other places, and knew that I wanted to make my own. It seems like such a useful item to have, a wardrobe staple if you will.  I wear a sweater of some sort almost every day.  Being cold indoors is the worst. I prefer to be at a nice warm nap temperature.

With having never made a sweater before, I thought that this simple cardigan without buttons or other closures would be a good place to start. For my first wearable muslin version, I bought some pink/orange sweater knit from Joann’s on clearance.  I bought far less than the recommended amount of fabric, but still had plenty of yardage to sew the short-sleeve version with a doubled hem. The sleeves are part of the body piece of the pattern, so I didn’t even have to insert them.

I used a zig zag stitch for all seams, and left any exposed seams raw.  I’m hoping to get a serger soon, but haven’t sorted that out quite yet.  The only place where I used a straight stitch was topstitching on the sleeve cuffs, if you can call them that.

There really was nothing tricky about this make: no hem, no closure, no interfacing, no sleeve insertion, nothing. Just a few seams to sew up. Thanks to this simple design, it was a quick make. The most time-consuming part was assembling the PDF pattern and cutting out the fabric. The actual assembly took less than two hours. That’s probably my second fastest make ever, after the Plantain.