Getting started after cutting

I forgot how corduroy sheds! There are little white balls of fluff everywhere. Oh well.

I found some very slightly off-white 100% cotton damask that I am going to use for the underside of the flaps and tabs. It isn’t very heavy and it has a woven pattern on it - I used it for a shirt that I still wear. I am hoping for the best.

I have been unpinning and marking (using blue chalk) all those pattern pieces. And then I have been using my clothes shaver (thanks Mum!) to get all the pills off the wrong side of the fabric. I hand picked them off the pieces to which I ironed the interfacing but it would have been too tedious to do that for all the other pieces. Then I have started pinning as many pieces together as I can get pinned without having them be sewed to other pieces. Hmm, that sounds odd. For example, each front of the jacket has three pieces to it. There will be two vertical seams and I have pinned those seams together. The back is composed of one central piece and two side pieces and I pinned them all together. I pinned the damask to the pocket flaps and tabs.

I was going to pin the sleeve seams together (the sleeves are two pieces each) but then I remembered that the vent openings need their edges finished because they ravel. I am embarrassed to admit how many times I have made this pattern before (okay, six) so I hung one finished jacket up in my sewing room to remind me of things along the way.

The plan with all this pinning, out of the order stated on the pattern instructions, is so that I can make the jacket a little bit faster, like on an assembly line. I do a lot of sewing and then I do a lot of ironing, and so on. If however, you are making something for the first time (or even the second or third, depending on how long it has been between makings) you should probably follow the instructions. On the other hand, these instructions don’t call for finishing the sleeve vent or the armhole seam and I make real flat fells on all the seams except the underarm seams. Sometimes experience and personal preference trumps instructions.