I decided that I would go ahead and go for the lower class jacket. I hemmed and hawed about whether I wanted to make one in my last post, but made up my mind. I had life size print outs made of the two jackets in Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion 4.
Since I had two printed, I marked one with hearts and the other with stars, to avoid mixing pieces together.
I wanted to try a method of construction that I heard about: sewing each piece of your pattern individually, and whip stitching the finished pieces together.
Once turned, the various pieces were all fluffy and wrong, so I ironed them into flat submission.
Ta-da! All flat. The cream colored fabric is a thin wool fabric (likely with a hint of some other fabric mixed in), lined with a red linen.
Here are all the happy pieces! The only one I didn’t do was the little cuff piece, since the lower class versions do not appear to have them.
I whip stitched all the pieces together, going through both layers of fashion and lining fabric as I went.
The big plus to this method: forever flat seams.
Now really, I should have figured out right here that I was in for a big disappointment when I was done. The sleeve went on to my arm, but it was not going all the way up to the shoulder, and was quite tight already. But still, I trucked on.
I was a little worried that the hip gores were not going to fit properly into the main jacket pieces, but they did with minimal fuss.
Another plus to this method: super sexy gore points. They can be tricky sometimes, especially when sewn by machine, but these came out beautifully.
Shoulder wings! Sort of silly looking though, aren’t they?
Ah, much better!
So I had pretty solidly figured out by this point that this jacket was way too small for me. This is the project that taught me that mockups are always a good idea. Well, I still wanted to enter it into my barony’s Arts and Sciences competition, so I put on the eyelets and hooks.
I made a simple torso display form for the competition, using wire and paper. Afterwards, the too-small-jacket was given to a friend who fit it a little better (although it was still a bit tight!).
