jacket progress

First off, thanks for the kind words on my last post, Mary and Gwen!

I’ve been making some nice progress on my jacket over the last several days, though slowly because I basically had no time to sew at all over the weekend. So here’s what’s been happening so far:

I basted the jacket together to check for the fit– I cut the size 40 out of the Burda magazine, but with 1″ seam allowances instead of the 5/8″ it called for. And look how much I still had to take it in! (Every line that’s further to the right.) The only place where I think I might need to adjust a little more is adding a teensy bit more room under the arms, but with the extra-wide seam allowances, that will be simple enough. Doing it this way made it really easy to sew for real, too– after I traced the new stitching lines onto my pattern pieces, I just sewed right over the basting lines, so nothing will get lost in translation.

My goal for today was to get the pockets taken care of, and I succeeded. So I did a little process photography– I was afraid that the Burda directions would be typically tough to follow, but this wasn’t bad at all!
First I had to press the pleats in and baste it…

Then sew the bands on the top. (The only problem I ran into here was that I should have checked to make sure the nap was going the same way, because I didn’t and I didn’t notice until the pockets were already sewed on. So let’s just say this was a design detail that I did on purpose, even though it was really just me thinking that the interfacing would probably be better on the outer side.)

Next step was to sew the lining to the other side of the band, with a gap for turning, then to sew all around the outer edge of the pocket.

And this is what I ended up with–it made a pretty nice clean finished edge, and I had no trouble with the lining peeking through when I sewed the patch pockets onto the jacket!

On a random note, this lining fabric is reminding me of Junior Mints.

And here’s the pocket on the jacket–it’s a little off-grain with the corduroy, because of the flare in the jacket, but it is parallel to the bottom edge and I think that was more important here.

The other project I’ve done over the last several days was to package up some projects for the next few months. I still need to cut things out, and trace out about 3 patterns from the Burda magazines and Sewing Handbook, but this is about a dozen projects’ worth of fabric packaged up with the patterns, any thread or notions I need (minus interfacing, since that will come with cutting out.) Since I’m starting to get work at the retail job already, at least I did yesterday, my plan is to cut out several of these all at once after I finish the jacket. And then I can just sit down and sew them whenever I have the time, in whatever order I want to do these in. I’ll most likely tackle the ones outside of the bin first, though I have to trace one of those patterns and double-check my jeans muslin to see if I need to make any more fitting tweaks. I think this should make it fairly easy to work in some mending projects and refashioning as I go on this, too!