New Jacket

March really was the month of jackets.  I completed my third and final one- a mishmash of a pattern from Moldecia (a Brazilian pattern magazine ala Burda) and Butterick 6104.  Here is the final result:

 

 It pretty much turned out how I imagined it while sketching a couple of weeks ago.  Here is the original idea.  Do you keep sketch books in random places?  Do you sketch ideas for sewing?

I knew that I didn't have a paper pattern for this, so I turned to my fairly extensive collection of pattern magazines.  I buy them with zeal, but never use them!  I really need to rectify that, because there are some awesome patterns out there.  So I found a base for the body + sleeves in a Brazilian one, called Moldecia.

 

One thing to note with Brazilian pattern magazines, is most of the patterns come in one size.  Luckily, the jacket was presumably in that size.  I didn't know for sure, since for whatever reason, Moldecia only printed the larger size measurements- so starting with a 44. This plus mashing the patterns together meant I needed to do a muslin.  The Moldecia pattern had the right style lines in the body, plus added ones on the sleeves.  But there was no peplum and the collar was wrong.

Enter Butterick 6104, which had the right collar and the right peplum.  The muslin was pretty straight forward with only a couple of alterations- lengthen the peplum by 2 inches, take in the body waist by 2.5 inches, and the original neckline with the collar was way too snug, so I widened it by 5/8ths of an inch on each side.

 

Now that I've bored you with the technical details of designing the coat, let's look at it again.

 

Even with the hiccups of sewing the front panels in backwards, it was pretty easy to put together.  The one thing that I would have changed if I really thought about it, would be to have the zipper go all the way to the bottom.  It's fine as is, but kind of a pain to get started.  Here it is from the back and side.  It looks like I could take a smidge out of the back, but it's not too bad.

 Now let's take a look at the quilting detail.  It's not truly quilted, as in I didn't use batting underneath, but some cotton sateen.  I am really trying not to spend much money on my sewing, as I really don't need too. 

Quilting took forever!  Hours and hours of it.  I did as much of it as I could before constructing it, as I figured it would be easier in the flat.  I learned a lot about sewing in a straight line.  I used up some cotton satin (at least that's what I think it is) for the lining.  You may remember it from my bomber jacket.

All in all, I love this jacket.  It's a great spring/fall jacket for Kyiv and for work, as it's a bit nicer than my bomber jacket.  Anyway, it's now April, and I've decided to try and enter the Pattern Review Wardrobe contest, which means sewing 8 items in the next 6 weeks.  I sketched my ideas out, and cannot wait to get started.

What do you think?  Everything will be sewn from stash fabrics, minus the Ginger jeans which hopefully will be sewn with the kit fabrics, but I don't know when in April the kit will be shipped, and so I might have to buy some denim her in Kyiv.  Here are the fabric choices.  And with that, it's time to get ready for work.  Until next time happy sewing.