Channeling Chanel

Hey Hey,

Happy New Year everyone!  I know 2016 was a rough year for a lot of people, and mine was no exception, so here's to hoping for all the best for 2017.  In sewing news I have a fun little jacket to share today.

To be honest the only part of this I actually sewed in 2017 was finishing off  the armscyes, everything else I pretty much had done in 2016.  Initially I was actually hoping to wear this little number to Christmas Eve dinner.  Spoiler alert… that didn’t happen... not for Christmas Eve, Christmas or New Years Eve dinner in fact.  Whoomp whoomp.

For those of you who don’t know, which I would assume is most of you, I work in downtown Manhattan, but I live in Queens. So everyday I silently train through the garment district but rarely get a chance to go shopping because usually all the stores are closed by the time I get off work.  Well the Friday before Christmas we had a half day so of course I took the opportunity to stop by Mood on my way home.  That’s when I saw this chic little vixen of a fabric passively leaning in the corner.  The only information it had on it’s tag was the price and that it was from Italy. It’s a knit backed, tracked fake fur and it’s sooo soft… on both sides.  To be honest when I first saw it, though I was clearly drawn to it, I wasn’t sure it was entirely me, it just looked too classy, lol.  Then I decided that if I liked it it must be ‘me’ right?  Maybe?  Either way I clearly walked home with some yardage.  1.5 to be exact.

Initially I wanted to make a coatigan, but the brutally honest portion of my brain was insisting that I didn’t have enough yardage to really do one proper justice, especially because the knit backing had stripes.  So I wracked my brain for all of about 5 seconds and then remembered that I had the Morris blazer pattern hibernating in my stash from a year or two prior. It was the perfect match.  If I couldn’t do a Coatigan, a Chanel-inspired cozy jacket was surely the next best option.

In 2015, Jillian from Crafting a Rainbow had dared me to make the Morris Blazer and I had made the majority of my changes to the pattern then.  You can see the full post here, but essentially, and I’m sure you can tell to a certain extent, the obvious changes I made were as follows:

1. I smoothed out the lapels, originally they come to a point
2. I straightened out to the hem, it also originally came to points
3. I lengthened the sleeves from 3/4 to full, and I added cuffs, which was a new addition from the last time I made changes

The less obvious changes I made were to:

1. do away with the hem facing. Instead I turned it up once by a half inch which I then hand sewed in place and then further hand sewed a satin ribbon on top of to enclose the raw edge.  I love the way this particular detail turned out.
2. hand sew the lapel facings down

In a way I’m really happy with how this jacket came out, but I also wish it had a little more structure.  In that way this fabric turned out to be a little challenging to work with.  Because one side of this double-sided fabric is fake fur, it was a bit of a challenge to figure out where and how to add interfacing.  In the end, I was really only able to add it to the lapel and collar facings and cuffs, which is the majority of where it was needed, but had I been able to add a little more to the hem and shoulders I'm sure it couldn’t have hurt.

 

Additionally when I did add interfacing to the lapel facings, I didn’t have any knit interfacing, only fusible woven interfacing which I wasn’t sure would really stick well to the soft knit, so after ironing it on, I did a little mock pad stitching of sorts, just adding small diagonal stitches, just barely picking up a thread or two as I went. Hopefully that will ward off any future bubbling if the knit tries to stretch itself off of the fused interfacing.

 

Anyways, that’s about it on this one.  I love it for it’s ability to look super old school chic (IMO), but I reaaaallly love it for it’s wrapped-in-a-stuffed-animal feeling :oD.

Kten