The Friday Pattern Co Victoria blazer review

My experience with the Friday Pattern Co has been intense in the past few months, and it has seriously been pretty checkered.  I knew ahead of time that this pattern has a rather tight sleeve - during our sewing weekend in Auckland I got to try on an XS in progress.  Thus I went with a size S.  I knew it would be long and so my vision was a kind of coat/blazer crossover.

I did not really anticipate how much fabric this needs. I'd considered a lot of different fabrics for it, but settled on a loose woven silk from Nepal, and it's a loomed width (110 cm) and it was not enough...so for the facing I went with a contrasting green linen.  I did NOT at any point think about how the facing of the front lapels would be actually so visible.  Once I realised that I committed this in my head to pretty solid muslin territory because I was not super enthused.  

Things started with some challenges.  The pocket placement is extremely and oddly low, the marks line up the pockets near the hem of the blazer, so I moved them up in order to have a hem in the end, this was still not really helpful as the pocket location meant I couldn't vary the hem upwards by much (unless I wanted to sew into the pocket).  The lining gap is in a strange location, and so I moved it a less obvious location.  Naturally I managed to octopus my sleeve hems into a mobius strip and had to undo the first one, ugh.  I did hand sew the seam allowance of the sleeve cuff together so it wouldn't flip out, and that small amount of extra work did seem to improve the sit of the lining in the cuff, and keep the cuff from unfolding outwards.  I'll keep that in mind for future makes.  I think there are recommendations to sew the lining of the hem like this as well and that makes sense because my hems of lined jackets always droop.

I was already pretty down on this because of the non-matching facing, and so when the hem went to hell in a handbasket I didn't fight too hard. Nothing lined up.  In order to create a semblance of closure I had to create a hem from nothing and the result is this totally horrible curve to the hems and some super dubious handstitching.  Far from finally learning a cool way to get that tragedy of hem, lining and front facing to meet in a friendly fashion, this was a ruin because the length of the facing, the amount of seam allowance of the facing towards the lining, and the lining/hem interface did not match as the instructions suggested they should.  It certainly could be due to interfacing the facing, so it was longer and pulled differently than the silk. Maybe it cut differently than the silk.  No idea.  

My final feeling was that although the fit of this isn't terrible - it does fit -  I never really like lapel things and I don't like this lapel thing, and I would never make it again and never try to figure out what has gone wrong with these instructions and placement of things.  I have previously mused that I will only be happy with a real coat or blazer when I commit to a serious one with layers, pad stitching, shoulder pads, and other tailoring realities that I only know about in a hazy vague way.  I think that's still the case.  I'm too picky to like an easy sew when I want the result of a complicated and well-designed project.  

This might suit someone who really wants that easy sew (which is most of Friday's market) but I don't have advice for the hems except to say maybe it was just me.  I recommend putting on the pockets late in the process when you can double check you are happy with the location.  I don't like the way it fits across my back - maybe I need some kind of wide back or muscled neck adjustment, but overall the fit is not the problem with this pattern.