I dug up an old, old article from Threads magazine, from April/May 2002. It was a rectangle cocoon cardigan/jacket. I have been seeing a lot of these cocoon cardis all over the place, and thought this was a cool – and fast – rendition of it. As it turns out, it took me over an hour and a half to do it. But in all fairness, I put a fussy baby to bed four times, finally tucking him in next to his father. I had nursed, rocked, changed and nursed again, when I decided that I’d had enough of small children for one day.
So I whipped (not really) together this cardi. It’s in a very forgiving wool/poly nubby and loose sweater knit in black and teal that I also have a poncho made out of – from Christine Jonson’s collection from 2004. It’s slightly more art-to-wear than I usually wear, but it’s interesting.
Basically you start with a large rectangle, about 2.5 yards x 25″ long (the width of the fabric piece is the length of the body of the sweater from shoulder to hem, along your body, the sleeve length is the width of the yardage of fabric you choose). You finish the edges of the rectangle then you attach the corners of the cardigan up at two points to form a curved hem/neckline, dolman sleeve and asymmetrical sleeve opening. It’s quite interesting. I belted this cardi and it looks great belted. Unbelted, in a soft rayon would just float next to the body. This sweater knit has more body than that so it does stand away (but not enough to make me look oversized).
You can also make this reversible out of two fabrics, and though the example in the article was in a lightweight woven, I think two knits would be superb. I wore mine with a turtleneck over black pants to the office. I wore it the following day too, with jeans, belted over a tee shirt.
The instructions:
Lay the fabric down on a flat surface. Measuring along the longest edge, find the center point. Mark this. In mine, I had to piece two sections of fabric together along a center back seam. This is OK!
Mark 2.5″ on either side of the neckline seam/mark. This is your neck opening. Then, measure from the neck line opening out 25″ along your fabric. This will be the sleeve opening mark.
You’ll take the top right corner and the bottom right corner and fold them up so the top right corner is attached at the sleeve opening mark, and the bottom right corner is attached at the neckline mark. This will create a trapezoidal shaped sleeve and front curved hem.