It’s time now to turn our attention to the upper half of this silver tweed Planned Partnership, the little boxy cropped jacket (#18) from Patrones 272:
You saw the jacket as part of a classy suit, but how does it work with jeans?, I hear you ask.
As it turns out, even better!
I actually prefer this jacket hanging open instead of buttoned up (which is why I left off the button loop at the very top of the collar stand and the small button hidden under the collar that the pattern suggested).
(Fun fact: I’m probably one of the few women in this day and age who know their glove size. I’m an 8! It coms with my high-quality leather glove addiction, you know…)
Turning to the back…
My only regret in the construction was not cutting the undercollar as two parts (on the bias), only because I didn’t have enough fabric to do it this way. Which means even despite my compensating for turn-of-cloth during construction, you can still see the undercollar poking out a little bit. But I actually did remember to use “directional sewing” when creating the collar this time around – this means you sew in one direction only, from the centre back out to the front tip of the collar, flip it over, and sew from the centre back out to the other collar tip. Have you ever had a RTW jacket or shirt where one collar flipped out a bit funny no matter how much you ironed it? That’s why – they did it the easy way, all in one go from collar tip-to-tip. The more you know!
I’m very proud of my beautiful bound buttonholes, especially since they’re paired with very pretty grey shell buttons from MacCulloch & Wallis that have a gorgeous pearly shine and a nice weight…
I pulled this lining fabric out of my stash and realised I’ve had it in there since.. ooh… the OMG LBD! Wow. And there’s still some left, even after lining the LBD, this jacket, and the matching skirt. I’m not 100% sure, but I think it might have come from the free Fabric.com designer bundle I got during my trip to America in 2007. The jacket tweed is woven from white, pale grey, pale peach/pink and pale blue threads – the pale peach/pink is an exact match for the fabric I’m making the sheath dress from and the pale blue is just too good a match fr the lining not to use here!
My Fabric Tetris superpowers means I squeezed both the jacket and the trousers out of the 1.5m of wool-mix tweed I’d bought from Totally Fabrics for £3.30/m during one of their 40% off everything sales. This means that together this suit cost me under a tenner for fabric, buttons, and zipper. Mwahahah!
If you don’t believe about my superpowers, this is the fabric I had leftover (these are single layers):
But even superheroes have their fatal flaw. Clearly mine is becoming my memory. See, all I could remember is how amazing the fit is on my Patrones duffle coat, which I wear all Fall and all Spring, completely forgetting about how many alterations I made to make it fit so damned well in the first place! Argh!
What I should have done was make a muslin. But I’m lazy, and only remembered the first point above. Barring that, I should’ve sewn the lining, then cut out and sewn the fabric. But I didn’t want to commit to that pattern until I was sure I could squeeze it and the skirt out of the fabric, so I had to cut the tweed before the lining. But in my defence, at least I sewed the lining together before the tweed, because it was instantly apparent on the first fitting that, “oh yeah – Patrones’ sleeves are freaking tiny! I totally forgot…”
Repeat it with me again, so I never forget – “Patrones’ sleeves are freaking TINY!”
So the first option was to rip out the sleeve seam (thankfully easier to do in lining fabric that tweed!) and sew as close as possible to the seam edge in the bicep area. I gained about a half inch of room this way, which made it tight, but not unwearable. My neighbour Helen had the idea, though, to turn the one piece sleeve into a two piece sleeve, so I cut up the pattern piece (though I didn’t even have room to do a properly wide under sleeve and even so, I only gained a half inch there since my largest remaining tweed pieces (pieced together) weren’t really big enough.
So in the end I just compromised by letting out underarm seam allowance (and by a corresponding amount on the shoulder seam for shoulder pad room) instead of creating an under sleeve pattern. It means I’m limited to wearing sleeveless or very thin short sleeves underneath it, but at least it’s wearable (and if I’d do this again I’d also let out the upper back like I did in the duffle coat as it’s a bit tight across my upper back, but there’s no quick fix for that so I’m just living with it, as I prefer it worn open anyway).
But enough about my stupid mistakes, I really think I made up for it in the little details here. I really love the little in-seam pockets, which, thanks to my understitching both sides of the opening, the lining never rolls to the outside. This was criminally easy to do just after attaching each pocket half to the body piece but before joining them together, and it’s something I’ll do time and time again.
And finally, you may think that I have all the fun with the designing, constructing and wearing of these clothes, but James has his fair share of creative outlet with the (currently freezing) photoshoots. IMHO he’s really outdone himself with the framing of this shot…
Coming up… the matching skirt!
And a big thank you to Lauriana for the Kreativ blogger award! I don’t really do the award thing, but her wonderful flattery will get her everywhere…
PS: Voting has started in the PR Lingerie Contest if you fancy voting for my Racy Lacy Lingerie set? Shame there’s no prize allocated for this one, though…