Measure twice, cut HOW many times?

My sister and a couple of her friends commissioned me to make a jean style jacket for another friend's new baby. They wanted a size two (to grow into), and for it to have a hood so you'd see some of the very cute lining they'd chosen. No problem I said, and began by drafting a hood from Aldrich and using that as a guide to graft on the hood from Jalie 2795, which I really like.

I was not happy with the height of my draft, and added height to the Jalie hood. Fortunately I have a pretty good size two fit model at hand and he was most obliging in modelling for me and allowing me to photograph the results as I tweaked the pattern.

Here's toile #3, mostly covers his head, but still pulling up the back and not coming far enough forward.

And toile #4, finally happy with it after redrawing the back neckline to make it sit lower and further forward.

Very concerned about WHY my original draft was so short when I've always had great success drafting from Aldrich I consulted all my other drafting texts, to no avail, before going back to Aldrich and my original draft and re-checking my work (which I do as I go, meticulously). Yup, I'd mis-measured the height of my hood while drafting. Once that was corrected it looked much better. Just out of interest I toiled it.

Toile #5. Perfect. At this point I swore a bit.

That one mistake in the drafting process (still don't know HOW I did that) led to an untold amount of work later. And to add insult to injury I like the basic hood better than my grafted Jalie, so I'm going with that after All.That.Work.

Lessons learnt:

1) If a draft looks wrong, check it from the beginning till you find out why.

2) Be sure of a draft before you use it to establish a design.

3) Toiles of questionable designs are invaluable as a learning tool.

I knew the last one anyway, but I would so much rather waste time and a bit of calico working this out than the nice fabric my sister and her friends bought and still end up with a too-small hood.