Chasing Coco

I happened to be in Toronto earlier this year for work and much to my very pleasant surprise Toronto has a large number of nice fabric shops! Apparently this is due to a booming film industry in the city. One of my coworkers had to practically drag me out of King Textiles , which was good as I had already had a pretty big fabric binge. King Textiles had a fantastic selection of wool, linen and above all, silk! I bought three different silks, two because I thought they might work for my jacket and one because it was on sale for 9.99 CAD/yard (even less USD!)! For silk dupioni! and it was an amazing color, though I did not have my wool with me, I did not anticipate it match my jacket's main fabric but low and behold, it's a fabulous combination - better than the other two choices I had bought in fact. No worries there, I will happily use them for other projects. Can you tell that I am absolutely in love with my lining? I'm actually having a bit of a silk love affair right...

After sewing my jacket together I ironed and shaped the seams over a tailors ham. E said I should pound the wool seam down and I was like "what the what?" I have to say I was absolutely certain this would do nothing at all but I swear that it did look different have it was beaten! It was like tenderizing a steak. It looks like a mid-evil torture device...  Jacket fronts, it's coming together slowly. There was also a lengthy discussion of pockets. I was very annoyed to realize that the welt pocket in my pattern ( vogue 7975 ) is not an actual pocket! It is just a fake sewed on embellishment, I'm very disappointed in you vogue! Pieces for an applied pocket are included but I was really feeling it design-wise. I think I've was using a plaid pattern boucle I would have liked an applied pocket, it is after a very Channel look. Maybe on my next jacket. E launched into a very lengthy explanation of how to make a welt pocket, draft a pattern for the needed...

So, I got at little derailed with my French jacket because last fall I happily got a wedding invitation from my best grad school friend, who I never get to see since she lives in Europe. On the plus side, she got married in Portugal and I had a very, very good reason to visit beautiful Portugal! This happy occasion really derailed my jacket because I decided in January to make her a quilt, which was a rather large undertaking, especially since I hadn't really ever made one before. It consumed my sewing time for the better part of 3 months and I still only finished the binding the night before I left and had to get it washed (puff! puff!) before packing it. Didn't it turn out fabulously though? I'm so glad I decided to make it for her! After that, I also decided to make linen pants this summer. I thought I had to have linen pants and couldn't find any that were remotely suitable in a store so I made those...that one is on me. But back to my jacket, I have big, b...

***I will update this post as soon as I can with photos. Unfortunately my phone broke recently and I lost all of my underlining photos! It has been a busy few months and progress on the fancy jacket has been slow...I apologize to those of you who have been following the project! I have been doing some sewing but unfortunately it has been focused mostly on a quilt I'm making a friend for a wedding gift - there's a deadline! However, I have underlined my jacket recently and you're overdue for a project update! Without further ado... Underlining helps a garment to curve toward your body, it rounds it to give it more shape. It's commonly confused with interlining, including at the fancy local fabric store I sometimes visit, which is used to add warmth to a jackets, for example. The underlining goes between your wool fashion fabric and your silk lining. For your underlining, I would suppose you could use almost any woven cotton fabric? Not really sure about that. I...

After the multi-week project of fitting my muslin, I was ready to cut my fabric. My crazy expensive fabric that I can't get any more of unless I make a 10-hour drive to New York. Just a little intimidating. Part of what makes a nice jacket is matching the pattern of the fabric at the seams, this is also a big pain in the rear. If you're like me, after you were sewing for a while you really started to notice how little commercial clothing bothers to match patterns especially at the side seams and it started to annoy you. Since this is my first jacket to have this complicated of a design, when I was shopping for my fabric I tried to consider the pattern and how difficult it would be to match. A lot of boucle is plaid so there is both a vertical and a horizontal pattern to consider. I choose a fabric that was more of a tweedy look so the pattern is less obvious because there aren't stripes, so if I don't have an exact match it will be less noticeable. To begin, I str...

Thankfully, this project has coincided with a plan to go to New York to visit some friends because, honestly I don't know where else I would find boucle! Even online the pickings are slim, plus then you can't see it and touch it which makes such a difference. This was the first time I've been to New York since I began sewing so it was my first trip to Mood . It was, in a word, overwhelming. So many pretttttyyyy things! Fortunately I was on a time crunch and had to stick to my list or I might now be mortgaging my house to pay for my fabric binge. My boyfriend was also with me and looked all over the store for Swatch (the store pooch that occasionally appears on project runway) to no avail. He kept coming back to where I was to report "I found a water bowl but no dog" "I found a painting of Swatch but no dog." He was so disappointed! It was also busy! I thought people did not sew anymore?!? I recently asked at a chain store here in NC if they had b...

Apparently my last post was way too optimistic! I went to go see E for sewing class and we made a bunch of alterations to my muslin. See in the photo below the left side has been altered and the right side has only the first round of adjustments I made.  The front princess seams were tweaked several times, the upper part of the sleeve is being let out a little and a pretty major adjustment to the armhole. Armholes are tricky! If I was making this totally on my own I probably wouldn't have made so many changes, I think we be accustomed to buying semi-fitting commercial clothes that we don't really have any idea what really fits and looks good on us. If it fits around us and isn't 10 sizes too big we think it fits! E also helped me alter the pattern so I could have a button up cuff with a facing, rather than just turning up the end of the cuff. Much more Channel. To do this,  E measured up my arm how far I wanted the cuff to go and we have then added fabric that all...