Chasing Coco

At this point, I have been thinking about and planning on making this jacket for a few months.I started by looking at examples of French jackets by channel, home sewists, other designers. For some examples for your own jacket, you can look here, here, here and here. I haven't bought any fabric yet! Do you believe that? Normally I have fabric, patterns and projects piled up way in advance! I'm hoping to make a trip to NYC to go to Mood and maybe some of the local shops and pick something out in person. I often buy fabric online, which is sometimes a disaster so in this case  as I will be spending a lot more on the fabric (I'm budgeting $200...but let's see how that goes!) I feel I need to make an in-person trip and frankly I haven't seen anything calling my name from my online browsing! I asked at a chain store I stopped at last night (I happened to drive by and they were having a sale!) and they did not even have any wool boucle. Eye roll . I wasn't surprised,...

About a year and a half ago, I took my first sewing class and after practicing making straight lines, I made a drawstring pouch. I fell in love! But I wanted to make clothes, not end up with 90 bags in the closet. I bought a sewing machine, and was rapidly taking sewing classes every weekend. Saying that I bit off more than I could chew, is something of an understatement...in the first few months, I took a "working with patterns" class and decided to make a dress with something like 14 pieces and that I wanted to put pipping on it. If you are new to sewing, the patterns they label as "easy" are NOT easy. I think they literally label everything that way. Eye roll. The working with patterns class was a 6 class series and I also worked on my project at home as much as possible. When it was done, it did not fit at all . I took an additional 2 open studio classes to get the thing to fit and cursed pipping every minute of every one of them, because it made adjusting ...