Musical hoodie

In the past, I haven’t always had the best of luck with my mp3 players. No matter how careful I was, for some reason they would always end up at the bottom of my bag on those days that I put heavy stuff in it. I racked one by dropping a flask on it, for instance. I took revenge, though, I broke the flask in that same bag just a few months later.

So, when I bought the latest player, a Creative Zen (which I absolutely love, by the way), I once again vowed to take extra care of it and to try not to break it. I’ve had it for nearly a year now, so I’m definitely on the right track. But it’s starting to look as if it’s owned by me. The screen has some scratches already, so I needed something to protect it from getting any more.

Enter the iPhoodie. Isn’t it cute?

What I liked
You can easily knit this with some left-over yarn and finish it in a couple of hours. I did this one in between two socks, to avoid the second sock syndrome.

Rough patches
I did have some trouble with the bottom cuff. It’s knit in the round and that means that you knit in a spiral. Once you’ve knit the hood and that you’ve joined in the round, that means that the start of your round is always in the front middle of your hoodie, right? And because I also started the ribbing at the start of the round, that means that I have one more ribbed row on the right than I have on the left. It’s hard to explain, but basically it means that you should only start ribbing at the side of the hoodie, and not in the middle.

What I changed

I used sock yarn for this hoodie, and since I knit socks on 2.5 mm/ US 1.5 dpns, I used these for this hoodie as well.
I started the pouch at the bottom instead of at the top. Otherwise I had the wrong side facing the outside. Also, I guess because I used a different gauge, the pouch then ended up way too high. So from the bottom up it was. To do so, I picked up 13 stitches about 2 rows above the ribbing. I knitted the uneven rows and purled the even rows. To decrease, I knitted the uneven rows as follows:
k1, k2tog, knit remaining stitches until you have 3 left , ssk, k1. I did so until I had 7 stitches left in total.

Instead of casting the pouch off and then sewing it to the hoodie, I used the 3-needle bindoff. To do so, I picked up 7 stitches with a second needle, held it behind the first needle with the stitches still on and then used a third one to knit them together and cast off.