Wool suit

I am doing pretty well in the fabrication of the suit.

I decided on this skirt pattern, even though it is a-line and the fabric has stripes. It is a comfortable skirt, easily lined and wears well.

I got all the pieces cut out. The skirt has four gores and two pieces for the yoke and then there's the lining. The jacket has lots of pieces! Each sleeve has two, the back has four, there are facings and the collar, and then there is the lining.

I'm making the patch pockets as I did for the red wool of the same pattern (see previous entry). I may have just enough of this blue wool left over for a vest but that will wait until I get these main two pieces finished. I found my "old" (1995) inspiration book for vests recently (I was hunting for printer paper) and suddenly, I am motivated to make more vests. I have quite a few already but I do wear them, especially when I'm wearing a dress shirt with a skirt. A vest adds a layer of warmth without being as warm as a whole jacket.

I have the body of the jacket done and the sleeves are ready to attach. The gores of the skirt are sewn together and I discovered that I had a matching skirt zipper in my stash, so I don't even need to go out for that. The only thing I'll go buy for this will be the buttons - I don't think I have anything that will work, although I will check of course. I wonder if brass or gold buttons would work?

Woolly jacket

I really put a push on to work on this jacket last night, as I knew I was heading to Darrell's today for his one-day-only 50% sale. And I got some lovely wool too! So now I really have to get cracking.

Last night, I got all the pieces together. Here are the sleeves, one right side out and the other wrong side out. I got the horizontal stripes lined up as sharp as can be.

I got the lining and facing pieces together.

And I got the jacket pieces together, before I put the sleeves on. I tried it on and it didn't seem like I was going to have problems with the armpits.

Then I put the sleeves on and tried it on and still no problems. This picture doesn't tell you much! But I thought I'd see how I could do a solo photo, holding the camera at arm's length, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, so I could see what was on the camera screen. Anyway, then I attached the lining jacket to the jacket, around the edges of the front and neck. The pattern instructions called for some other, more complicated way of putting it together and I bailed, because I know how to make a lined jacket without fiddling around.

Here's another shot of the jacket inside-out, but after I attached the lining to it. I have lifted up one sleeve. It looks like it bags under the arm but it doesn't bind. Maybe the problem mentioned earlier came from how that small side piece under the arm was handled? I can't say.

Here's what the seam looks like where I attached the front to the facing. Even though I lined up the bottom stripe, the stripes don't match all the way up. Weird. It won't matter because there are no lapels and so you won't see how the stripes don't match. Of course, I haven't ironed the seam open and haven't turned the jacket and haven't ironed it flat again. So maybe it will be okay. I'll know when I run back upstairs now, to finish this jacket, so I can sew something else!

In the meantime, this jacket (it's so small I want to call it a jackette) calls for one large button at the neckline. Here is a collection from my stash. Hmm.

Woolly jacket

I had a lovely parental unit visit over the weekend, but with that and trying to squeeze that last of the Summer out of the last of Summer, and school starting next week (I teach), I have not been sewing!

Even though this jacket is really a muslin (and if it doesn't work, it'll go to the Sally Ann), I am compelled to finish the inside as well as if it wasn't. And if it does work and I do wear it, then I will be glad I did finish the inside. I used pinking shears to cut the lining pieces. The "wool" is loosely woven so I have zigzagged all the edges that will be ironed open at seams. The shoulders will be zigagged and trimmed after they are sewn so I didn't do those ahead of the construction. The entire fronts are interfaced and I used iron-on interfacing so I didn't need to zigzag those edges. And the front facings are also interfaced. This is one of the few times I have put interfacing on the entire front (not just the facings) so I am looking forward to how that works and feels, assuming I end up wearing the jacket.

The brown outfit

I'm doing my assembly line kind of sewing, where I pin together as many things as possible and then run them all through at once, so I don't even cut the threads between pieces until they're all sewed. Once I amass a pile of sewed pieces that need ironing before I can attach them to other pieces, then I turn them if they need turning right side out and iron them all at once too. So far I have done the four pockets, their flaps, the collar, the front facings and four tiny darts in the jacket fronts. I could have done the sleeve vents but I forgot. No time for pix! But later, maybe.

Continuing with the green suit

It took quite a while to get ALL the pieces cut out, as there was lining and interfacing too. Then I had to iron on the interfacing and finally I was ready to start the assembly.

I did my usual thing which is to say I pinned together as many pieces as I could, regardless of where they were in the order of instructions. Once I had used up all my pins, I sewed all the pieces I had put together in one big assembly line, spitting them out the back of the feed dogs and running a new piece in. Then I ironed all the seams I had made and started in with more seams.

Because the sleeves are two-piece and there is no matching underarm seam on the sleeve to correspond with the body of the jacket, I have to make the sleeves into tubes and then fit them into the jacket. I do this with both the jacket and the lining sleeves. I also make the outer jacket and the lining jacket and then put them together around the front edge, which we'll get to later. I also zigzag stitched all down the seam allowances on the skirt because I will be pressing the seams open and not finishing them in a flat fell. The skirt is also fully lined so I don't feel the need to finish the raw edges more than that.