Tailored Jacket: Little Pieces into Bigger Pieces

For me, construction always happens in a funny sort of time warp. No matter your best laid plans and fondest wishes, the garment will act like a petulant toddler during certain tasks that should be easy.

(Sewing darts?? Really?? I thought we had this one down, jacket friend.)

And, equally perplexing, things that are obnoxious in other materials will sail along happily, nary a problem in sight.

(Easing cotton into cotton? I want to eat tacks. Easing wool into more wool? Um, literally the best.)

But before I could even begin the time vortex of construction, I had to fuse interfacing onto most of my jacket pieces. I'm interfacing the entire front of the jacket, all of the facings, and the neckline and armhole of the back bodice, so that was a lot of fusing! The interfacing gives a surprising amount of structure and thickness to the body of the jacket, which led me to my next adventure...

  

The aforementioned dart problem! I was finding that the bulkiness of the interfaced fabric was interfering with pinning and sewing the darts in, so I ended up getting some topstitching thread and hand-basting the darts in to prevent the fabric from shifting underneath the machine. It didn't take very long, and it flattened out a lot of the bulk and made all of my darts sew in perfectly. Awwww yeah.

Also note the ridiculous pattern matching I did when I cut the undercollar. I had forgotten about it until today, when I went to fuse the pieces and was pleasantly surprised - they're both cut on the bias, but I arranged and cut them separately so that they're exact mirrors of each other. High five, past self!

And this is what I ended up with: two bodice fronts, two front peplums, a back peplum, and a bodice back. I'm going to be doing a full day of jacket with our tailoring teacher on Monday, so I'm trying to get as much done as possible before then. I'm hoping to get a bit of my lining constructed this weekend too, but we'll see how that goes.

As for that vortex: I thought I was going to get everything cut out and fused, and the darts, tucks, and princess lines sewn - all in about five hours or so. Instead, it's been about 10 hours of work over two different days. Hah! Hah! Time flies when you're deeply out of touch with reality!

Happy Friday! <3

Cory