Hooded Jacket in Bergere de France Ideal - 72680-08 - Downloadable PDF

Bergere de France Ideal Hooded Jacket Knitting Pattern (72680-08)

This downloadable PDF knitting pattern from Bergere de France provides instructions for a charming hooded jacket designed for babies and toddlers. The pattern covers four sizes — 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, and 24 months — making it a versatile project for knitters who want to create a cosy, stylish outerwear piece for little ones. Rated as an intermediate difficulty level, this pattern is well suited to knitters who are comfortable with shaping techniques, working with multiple colours, and combining different stitch patterns within a single garment.

What Is Being Made

The finished project is a hooded jacket for babies and toddlers, featuring a structured hood, raglan-style shaping, and decorative embroidered detailing. The jacket fastens with three white shank buttons (15 mm, reference 42479), giving it a neat, classic finish. The garment is constructed using a combination of stitch textures and colour accents, resulting in a piece that is both practical and visually appealing.

Yarn and Materials

The pattern is designed for use with Bergere de France Ideal, a DK weight yarn, which is known for its soft, baby-friendly qualities. The jacket uses three colourways worked together to create colour interest:

• Cendre (A) — shade 24241: The main colour, used as a double strand held together throughout the jacket. Quantities range from 7 balls (3 months) up to 12 balls (24 months).
• Meije (B) — shade 51253: A contrast colour used for embroidered detailing, requiring 1 ball across all sizes.
• Brouilly (C) — shade 20307: A second contrast colour, also used for embroidery or accent work, requiring 1 ball across all sizes.

An important construction note is that the entire jacket is worked using two strands of colour A held together, which creates a denser, warmer fabric while still working at a DK gauge on the specified needles.

Needles

The pattern calls for 5.5 mm knitting needles throughout. This needle size, combined with the double-stranded DK yarn, produces a firm, structured fabric appropriate for a baby jacket that needs to hold its shape.

Stitches and Techniques Used

Garter Stitch (G. st)

Garter stitch is formed by knitting every row on both the right and wrong sides of the work. It creates a ridged, slightly elastic fabric that lies flat without curling, making it ideal for borders, edges, and structural sections of the jacket. In this pattern, garter stitch is used extensively for the body sections and borders, providing stability and a classic texture.

Stocking Stitch (St st)

Stocking stitch — knit on the right side and purl on the wrong side — creates the smooth, classic knitted fabric used for the main body panels of the jacket. The pattern combines garter stitch and stocking stitch panels within the same piece, for example working 5 stitches in garter stitch alongside 22–28 stitches in stocking stitch depending on the size, which adds visual contrast and structural definition.

Raglan Shaping

The jacket features raglan-style armhole shaping, a technique where stitches are cast off and then decreased at regular intervals to create a diagonal seam line running from the underarm to the neckline. Raglan shaping is popular in children's knitwear because it produces a comfortable, flexible fit with minimal bulky seaming at the shoulder. The pattern specifies casting off 2–3 stitches at the beginning of rows to initiate the raglan shaping, with continued working as set until specific measurements are reached.

Increasing

The pattern includes shaping increases worked on the right edge, 3 stitches in from the edge, increasing 1 stitch 7 times every 2nd row. This type of internal increase, placed a few stitches in from the selvedge, creates a neat, decorative increase line while maintaining a tidy edge for seaming.