My coatigan journey stretched from “I don’t really know how to crochet” all the way to “I appear to have made a coatigan”. But I absolutely didn’t make this journey on my own – here’s how it unfolded.

I was pretty comfortable where I was in my range of crafting experience – cross stitch, embroidery, bead weaving, English paper piecing, blackwork, some knitting and quilting – but I had always been a bit wary of crochet. With knitting, I felt fairly secure you know where you are because you can count the stitches on your needle but with crochet, there’s only one loop on your hook – how could I possibly know whether I had the correct number of stitches when I couldn’t be sure where they were? And that’s not even mentioning the baffling pattern instructions and diagrams. I decided to leave my expert co-workers in the team to handle the crochet side of things, allowing me to remain comfortable as the go-to person for stitching-related matters.

And that was fine. Until towards the end of last year, when we launched some yarn packs to accompany the Carefree Coatigan design in Sam Sabido’s book My Granny Square Wardrobe. The front cover of the book showed an image of the coatigan, and then designer Sam sent the actual garment to us so that we could take some photographs for our social media feeds. It was gorgeous. And I suddenly realised that I was going to have to make one. Oh dear.

I visited the Yarnsmiths Create DK area in our warehouse to select my colour scheme. I decided the main colour for my coatigan would be Navy Blue (3310) and I chose the bright, jewel tones of Vintage Teal (3228), Hydrangea Blue (3266), Bluebell (3362), Petal Pink (3364), Pinkberry (3374) and Lilac (3350) to complete my selection. I allocated each of my colours to ones in the pattern, my Navy Blue replaced the Oatmeal in Sam’s version, and I was ready (sort of) to begin.

Sam had released a series of tutorials on her YouTube channel, Sam Sabido Crochets, each one demonstrating a step in the coatigan process, so that is where I went, armed with my crochet hook and yarn, to begin my creation. There I found both a general introduction to the project and an introductory tutorial especially for beginners – and I began to feel a little less anxious about this whole idea. I watched, and re-watched, and then copied, to create Round One of my first-ever granny square. I then followed the subsequent tutorials for each of the next Rounds, upto Round Five. It seemed to go OK, but I knew I would have to re-check the tutorial for each Round if I carried on creating one granny square at a time. So, instead, I began to create all the Round One’s for my squares, in the different colours specified in the book – in that way, I would get the hang of what was required and just keep doing the same thing, in different colours, until I had completed all the Round One’s, followed by all the Round two’s, until the end.

So, several months and 92 granny squares later, I embarked on the mammoth task of sewing in all the yarn ends. I didn’t mind at all (I like sewing), and there was a YouTube tutorial to give me very helpful guidance and advice. Sam had also recorded a tutorial on blocking the squares – I didn’t have the board and pegs set, but I did have a hand-crafted (by my partner❤️) blocking board consisting of a small square of wood and four long screws, one in each corner. It worked brilliantly – every evening I would stretch the corners of five or six slightly wonky granny squares over the screws, spraying each with water, and every morning I would remove some beautifully square pieces of crochet. Things were looking good, it was going OK.🤞

That is, until I lost my nerve. It happened at the point where construction needed to begin: I was too far in to give up, but I was too scared of messing it up to complete it. So, I ignored it as best I could, although it was spread all over the floor of my craft room. Eventually, my co-workers convinced me it was looking OK so far, and that I could finish it. The friendly encouragement and support was enough to make me begin crocheting together the squares into strips and, with the help of more of Sam’s tutorials, the strips into sections. Having tried out the length of the front sections by holding them against me, I decided to make my coatigan one granny square shorter than the pattern, as I am not tall, which left nine squares for future use in a different creation (now that I am an expert in crocheting…😉)

Coatigan parts were ready, blocking was next. The grid lines on our Yarnsmiths Blocking Mats were very helpful in pulling my edges into lines. Sam’s layout was designed to ensure no identical squares were next to each other but, with the pieces layed flat on the blocking boards, I could see that two of my identical squares were next to each other on the back section. But, too late – I won’t be drawing anyone’s attention to that when I’m wearing it. 🙂

Construction took a while – I was anxious to ensure I didn’t attach any sections upside down, the wrong side out or to an incorrect part, but Sam’s videos were really clear and helpful and suggested pinning pieces together with stitch markers before crocheting them, which was a great tip. Next was adding the ribbing to the cuffs, the bottom edge, and all around the front edge and hood. I didn’t know this was possible in crochet, but Sam carefully explained and demonstrated how to crochet into the front and back post of the previous stitch and, generally, I felt pretty pleased with my effort. For the sleeves, you could crochet the rib into every stitch, giving a looser look, or gather them into a smaller cuff for a snugger fit. I chose to make them fit closely around my wrists by beginning the rib in every third stitch rather than every stitch, and Sam’s instructions explained how to make this work. She was also, happily, entirely relaxed about how to move on from errors if you weren’t keen to undo crocheting and I embraced this approach, so there may be just a few places where the front and back stitching is not strictly in sequence…🙂

Approaching completion now, I chose the fastenings – I went for really lovely 50mm navy blue toggles from Dot to Dot Haberdashery on Etsy. I attached the first pair on the edge of the front ribbing before realising that they needed to be set back into the granny squares in order to fasten without a gap (I’ve never sewn on toggles before, I hadn’t thought of that).

Finally, I departed from the pattern entirely and added a tassel to the pointy top of my hood. I just felt it neeeded one.

So, it was done: I had arrived on planet Coatigan, somewhat amazed that I had crocheted a garment and achieved my goal. It was, on reflection, ambitious to say the least, but thanks to Sam’s videos and helpful words, and the encouragement of my team mates at work, I had successfully navigated the coatigan journey. So, I think I’m returning to cross stitching for a while, at least until I recover my fibre arts motivation, although there is a very tempting toadstool jumper pattern on Sam’s Etsy store… 😎