New Project - Jean Jacket, Corduroy

A jean jacket.


One of the remnants I picked up last week was about 1.5 meters of white corduroy. I thought right away that, if there was enough, I could make a jean jacket with it. After I got it home, washed and dried and shrunk it, I saw that it was 144cm wide and 1.57m long. I also ironed it as as I was doing so, noticed it had a small hole in it. I marked the hole with a piece of blue thread so I wouldn’t miss it while cutting.

(That’s the wrong side of the fabric - there are little pills everywhere from when I washed it - and I’ve left a tail of thread on both sides.)

I started laying out the pattern pieces, wondering if I could get the whole jacket out of it. I remembered some jackets I have seen in catalogues like LLBean, where the underside of the collar and cuffs and other parts were made in a contrasting fabric, so I thought I could do that if I ran short of the corduroy. However, in rummaging through my boxes of left-overs, I didn’t find anything that I thought would be suitable for a contrast. As it turned out, I had just enough for most of the jacket, except for a few bits.

(That gap where there is no pattern piece is where the second layer of the yoke will go. You use the same pattern piece on the fold to cut out two pieces for the yoke. I put the pattern piece in the space and pinned other pieces around it. Then I moved it to another place on the fabric.)

Those “few bits” were the underside of the pocket flaps and the tabs on the waist, as well as the internal parts of the front pockets. I ended up cutting those little pieces out of some white broadcloth I had lying around but now I realize that this is not heavy enough fabric and I must look for something else.

The corduroy is heavy with the wales on it and I thought that using a lighter weight fabric as the underside would make the pieces less bulky. However, broadcloth is way too light and I won’t be happy with the end result if I don’t use a mid-weight cotton like a drapery weight, rather than the broadcloth. Last night, I also got the interfacing ironed on so now I just have to find some other cotton for the flaps. All in all, I cut out 24 pattern pieces (that includes the interfacing too) and I have dents in my fingers from sticking pins through the corduroy, as well as all that cutting. Quite a contrast to 4 pieces for the skirt!