Coat of many colours

The photo at left is reasonably accurate in depicting the crazy colours in The Sewing Lawyer's recently completed jacket, and she likes all of them!

The jacket doesn't go with everything in my closet, but there are quite a lot of choices.

To the right, here it is with my new grey pants and a teal sweater (which is however hiding from view under the buttoned jacket).

Aubergine top

Or how do you like it with an aubergine wool top (Jalie 2682) and the same pants?
















Or we could go with a dress. My new grey one, from BurdaStyle (August, 2012), is a natural.

Grey dress

Or a black dress (BurdaStyle, February, 2012).  I even tried it with a bright turquoise dress (Burda, February 2012).

Turquoise dress

Black dress

I do like what the crazy stripes do in the back.


It occurs to me that there is a hole in my wardrobe that could be plugged with a new pair of dark navy pants. You may not be surprised to learn that there is a pant length of such fabric in The Sewing Lawyer's stash. And something in a nice cherry red... So many possibilities, so little time!

Productivity

Sadly, my annual five week sewcation is over. Happily, it was more productive than ever, resulting in a swimsuit and exercise top, dress pants, a knit dress, two knitted cardigans (one by machine and one mostly hand knit) and the pièce de résistance, my new jacket. It was hardly a sweatshop, however, as I found time to do lots of other fun things too.

I'll post modeled shots of the jacket when I have time at home during daylight hours. But this is it. Vogue 2770, OOP, a Tamotsu designer separates pattern.

Sweet and simple and striped in multi colours. Light and soft and warm.

Making up a pattern that I had already adjusted for fit was a treat.

I kept the construction fairly simple and the jacket has minimal structure.

Fusible underlining; serged SAs

I underlined all body pieces with an extremely light weight fusible interfacing, to give some body to the very soft and loose-woven fabric, but also to minimize its inherent stretchiness (mostly in the length, surprisingly). I underlined the sleeves with silk organza cut on the bias as I wanted to keep them light.

All seam allowances were serged to control the tendency of the fabric to fray.

The sleeve caps were eased with a bias strip of wool which also serves as a light sleeve head. I inserted shoulder pads.

The jacket is fully lined with Bemberg. I went with this weird purply-grey colour.

The buttonhole was made with my vintage Singer buttonholer (perfect every time).

All this goodness, including wool, lining, interfacing, thread and button, came from The Sewing Lawyer's imperceptibly diminishing stash.

I have enough of the fabric left to use it as an accent on another piece (a yoke for a skirt?). Maybe I should check stash for coordinating fabric or leather... Who knows what's in there?

Vogue 2770 encore

Way back when I spent a lot of time altering the pattern for the jacket from Vogue 2770 to fit me perfectly. Why waste all that work? I'm making it again.

Out of this unique and irreplaceable fabric.

I got it at the Fabric Flea Market (where else?) in 2009. The vendor told me she had raised the sheep (merino), sheared the wool, spun and dyed it, and then wove it (together with a few novelty yarns) into this luscious and completely irregular stripe.

The fabric is only 98cm wide and the vendor had cut it into skirt lengths of around 1.5m. I bought two, which are enough for the princess seamed jacket.