Little French Jacket Progress Report 2

When I left you at the end of Progress Report 1, I had quilted the lining to all the jacket pieces, tied squillions of loose threads and was ready to sew the jacket together. The pieces are first basted together with a machine stitch, so fitting adjustments can be made. In my case, the adjustments were necessary to match the stripes in the fabric, which were just not lining up after sewing. It helped a lot to use lots of pins (above) and to sew slowly with the walking foot in place. You can also see that the lining has been pinned into a little parcel to keep it well away from the seam stitching.

The seam allowances are still kept very large at this stage to allow for fitting and fraying of the fabric.

This is the outside of the jacket with my labels still in place to make sure I sewed the pieces in the correct order! The fronts are not yet sewn on in the picture above. Once they were basted in place, I sewed the peplum pieces together and attached the peplum to the jacket bodice as one piece. The shoulder seams were then pinned together to check for fit.

A rare glimpse into the chaos that is my beloved sewing room. Please don't look too closely at the mess, most of which is cropped out of the photo!

Next up was the sleeves, which had not even been cut out at this stage. The muslin sleeves were pinned in place on the jacket and lines were marked (pencil lines just visible below) where the stripes of the fabric met the sleeve. Obviously not all stripes can be matched due to the shape of the sleeve. It is up to the sewer to decide which ones to match, usually those on the upper sleeve are chosen. I chose to match the main pink stripe on the upper sleeve, front and back, as this was the most obvious.

The muslin was then placed on the boucle fabric and the stripes matched up with the pencil lines before cutting. The other sleeve piece(s) were then matched to the first to keep those stripes as perfect as possible. Then it was back to hand stitching the sleeve outline on the boucle and quilting lining to all the sleeve pieces before matching the stripes (below) and basting the sleeve together.

Then it was time to pin the sleeves in place and try on the jacket! This was awkward as it felt so fragile and still had raw edges, huge seam allowances and the lining pinned away from seams. Still, it was an exciting moment after all the work.

Bear in mind that the inside was very bulky so the jacket does look a bit strange in these pictures. However, from what I could tell, the fit was pretty good, so it was on to the next stage - coming soon!

Please refer to my First French Jacket post for information and links to the fantastic sewalong I am following to make this jacket.