Reversible Oversized cropped jacket
This was the second garment I made for the Mood Sewing Network and I feel both equally happy and semi disappointed with the outcome. When perusing the fabrics, I fell in love with the neon pink and yellow large scale poly Jacquard (bet you didn't think I could possibly find a way to add more descriptors). What I loved about it was the brightness of the fabric, it is truly neon, and I also loved the scale of the rose print. I don't know if this is true, but it feels like you can get small prints, anytime anywhere, but large prints are fewer and farther between. Once I had it picked out though, the ideas started flowing and I couldn't stop think about how a total contrast lining would be absolutely perfect. Because the first fabric was pink and yellow, I wanted the second fabric to be blue and something... like literally hitting all the primary colors on the color wheel. Thats when I found the blue/green cotton jacquard. Together I think the fabrics really play well off of each other.
Once I had these two opposite but complimentary fabrics chosen, I started thinking... what makes one better than the other. Why should one forever get to be the star and the other forever be sentenced as a lining? Seemed unfair no? Especially since both were so beautiful. So the natural course of action was to draft this coat in such a way that it could be reversible. Neon on some days and more subdued on others, win win.
I only ordered a yard of each fabric so I knew whatever design was destined for this fabric was going to have to be light on fabric usage, luckily I am a fairly petite person with only a 5'2.5" stature, so if I make anything cropped, it generally doesn't use that much fabric. On the other hand because the pink and yellow fabric had such a luxuriously large print, I wanted to make sure that whatever design I made had big enough pattern pieces to let the print sing. Thats how we got to an oversized but cropped shape, though to be honest, because I am so petite I think cropping oversized looks tends to look better on me anyways.
I also made the decision to add a layer of batting in between the two fabric layers, but in this case, I'm not sure it really added to the garment in the way I intended and were I to be given the opportunity to make it again I think I would try to find a lighter-weight batting. What particularly irks me about how the batting is functioning in this piece is that it is pushing out the dropped shoulders instead of allowing them to really relax as intended. Because of that I'm getting matador vibes, instead of the slouchy bo-ho vibes I was going for. Ahh, we live and we learn don't we? I'm kind of hopeful that with some wear, the batting will succumb to gravity a bit. I'll let you know how that goes.
The fabric was equal parts a dream and a challenge to work with. The blue/green fabric is a tightly woven cotton and did not fray a bit, the pink/yellow fabric is a poly and it frayed if you even breathed in its presence. I probably should have serged all my cut edges on the pink/yellow fabric right after cutting, but I chose to live on the edge, and live on the edge I did. I gave myself 1" SAs at the side seams (because I was going to flat fell them), but 5/8" everywhere else, and that fabric got mighty close to fraying itself outside of the seam allowance in places. I'm slightly afraid, it still might in fact, if I'm not gentile when handling it.
Other than semi fraying issues, the construction was very easy.
For each layer, pink/yellow, blue/green and the blasted batting, I sewed as follows:
(I would also like to note, that because I decided to add batting, I knew I was going to have to add some quilting and was worried about shrinkage. As such I decided to sew everything together with 1/2" seam allowances instead of the 5/8" seam allowances I had included when drafting. In the end I ended up adding a very sparing amount of quilting and it was all done by hand, so I really don't think this was necessary and do wonder how taking out that extra 1/2" all around would look)
- the front bodice pieces to the back bodice pieces at the shoulders
- then attached the sleeves
- then sewed all three layers together (blue/green and pink/yellow right sides together with the batting layer on top), from center back at the neck, down around the neck, down the center front and across the front hem, stopping at the side seam seam allowance mark (and back-tacking of course)
- then I sewed across the back hem, again starting and stopping at the side seam seam allowance markings (always back-tacking at the beginning and end, not going to mention this again).
- then I flipped everything right side out and burrito'd the sleeves hems, again starting at stopping at the side seam, seam allowance markings.
- if you don't know what 'burrito'ing' means, its basically:
- take your three layers and start rolling them all from one side to the other, as if you were making a burrito
- when you get to the end, take the bottom layer and gently pull it from under the roll, to on top of the roll
- now your two outer fabrics will be matching right side together with the batting layer underneath.
- Pin that all together and sew it shut, again mindful of the side seam seam allowances.
- Then you can flip everything right side out again through one of the side seam openings
- repeat that all over again to 'burrito' the other sleeve hem.
- The burrito process is mentally complex, but physically simple and thus, magic. lol. (Just for your information, this process if often used to clean finish yokes on traditional collared shirts.)
- After everything was closed off except the side seams, I turned everything out and basted the living ish out of it. It was at this point that I couldn't decide what kind of quilting I wanted to do. I knew I had to add something, because my batting, had to be quilted every 10" and my back and sleeve pieces were larger than that at their widest parts, but the initial idea I had, which was to make continuous diagonal lines, from center front to middle of the sleeve to center back, ended up looking very varsity cheerleader to me once basted out. So then I tried adding some geometric squares. But I didn't like how they chopped up the roses. Then my husband suggested I outline all the pattern pieces and add concentric decreasing rows. I wasn't quite onboard for that, but that idea eventually lead me to outline the entire boarder of the jacket on both sides. I absolutely wanted to have quilted continuity from pattern piece to pattern piece. Then to add a little individuality and the much needed quilting, I outlined some of the flower motifs on the pink/yellow fabric and added one large diamond to each of the sleeves and the back of the blue/green side.
- Simultaneously, while I was doing all this basting, I was also starting to consider if I should do all this quilting by hand instead of by machine. There were two positives to this option, which were A- I could navigate having absolutely no contrast thread showing up on both sides, ... something I was not able to achieve while swatching, because no matter what settings I chose, the dark thread I chose for the blue/green side, showed through the little needle puncture holes on the pink side, and vise versa. B- I would have better control and could make sure all the seam lines stayed exactly aligned. So that's what I did. I bought some embroidery weight thread and added all quilting stitches by hand, picking up only the matching fabric and batting. So the batting is quilted to both fabrics but the blue/green fabric and pink/yellow fabric are not quilted to each other. Totally weird right?
- Anyways, when that whole process was done... which quite frankly took days... one morning for the actual embroidery, but many for figuring out what I wanted to do, I flat felled the side seams closed to the blue/green side because its darker. Again this is something I think I could have done by machine because the space between the pattern pieces is large enough to maneuver my machine through, but I decided to do it by hand, A for ease, because again the pink/yellow fabric was fraying like crazy and I wanted to be sure to trap the little frayed ends and B because sewing it by hand meant there was no show through to the pink/yellow side, which makes it look that much more lux (IMO)
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