I saw this pattern and I was so completely in love with the back. I had an irritating meter of boiled wool and so immediately I thought it would be amazing to use a bunch of colours of boiled wool for this jacket. I went on a hunt for all the colors. It took awhile to accumulate, because all the nice ones were in Germany and wouldn't ship to New Zealand. I finally had them all, and I had the pattern pieces ready to go, and then realised I needed *one more color*. Ugh. I ended up moving, with this in a kind of mess as one of those projects I really wanted to do before I moved, but just didn't manage.
Blue boiled wool was from Miss Maude
White boiled wool was from The Fabric Box
The other 3 colours were from Mood Fabrics, an order that I justified specifically because of this project.
I made size 36 for a 84 cm chest, as my chest measurement is about 83 cm but I am happy to overestimate a touch due to my wide back, rather than sizing down, especially for a jacket.
So, other people have mentioned there are two options for the button placket. Maybe the original, non-pieced pattern has two button placket options. But the pieced pattern only has one - you have to sew on a separate button facing on both fronts, so you end up with double thickness and seams everywhere. I would have liked the other option to decrease bulk. I tried to use a different fabric but it was a catastrophe so I went back to double thickness boiled wool, which at least does respond to a hot damp iron.
I knew going into this that the instructions would be sparse, and they were. They don't provide you much help if you are a beginning sewist and need some hand holding. I took it slowly and thought hard about management of the insides, since all the seams were visible. I found that the instructions mirror imaged reality, ie when it said right front, it's actually the side on my left when I'm wearing it. But they were consistent so it didn't matter. All the pieces lined up and the order of attaching them made sense. The pockets are just low enough that I can snake my hands into them. I did not even consider folding in a seam allowance on the inner collar, since the wool won't ever fray, I just sewed it down as is. I then added some extra stitching to keep the collar hem from rolling out. This worked ok, I think I would wear it with the collar kind of up, but it will go down too.
I got to the end, not sure if I was making something just so cool, or a clown jacket. And I made the fatal error. Those two layers of boiled wool would NEVER receive buttonholes from my sewing machine, and while I do have a backup workhorse Bernina, I instead committed to snaps. I think I'm gonna retire my Prym snap set now. While the snaps do sometimes work, on any complex fabric they are almost worse than buttons. I needed to hand sew snaps on. Hand sewn snaps are GREAT. I realised my error after I made lots of snap holes and was committed to snaps and then snaps started falling out. I went down a wormhole of snap repair etc which involved glue and one fake snap where things just got too terrible. At the end of this, while pleased with the back of the jacket, I don't really want to own it. A friend has raised her hand for it and I'm kind of relieved to pass it on. I do like it, but I kind of FEEL like a clown in it, and the snaps have been the nail in that coffin.
But I still really LOVE the back. I might come back around to this idea someday, just using the patchwork star or something.
No comments:
Post a Comment