Jacquard jacket

This one hasn’t been planned at all. But that’s not too unusual for me 🙂 As I wrote in my previous post, I was planning another vest, perhaps pants, then – Chanel style tweed jacket. And yet – here we are with this quite a bit different project. It’s good that this jacket is at least meant for spring, so I have managed to not do something completely unreasonable 🙂 For my defense, I can say that I had been seriously planning a Chanel style tweed jacket, was testing few patterns for it, and then chickened out! I could not make myself cut into an expensive tweed still being unsure about the design of the jacket and moreover what kind of trim I’d be able to make for it. So while deliberating and not making up my mind, I took this pretty cheap jacquard instead and made a “test”. Well, I think this jacket is really nice in and of itself, perhaps a bit too shiny, but hey – I had a piece of fabric, so I needed to make something out of it anyways!

Deliberations

Alright, jokes aside, I was seriously preparing for a tweed jacket project, and the main thing in the very beginning was to decide on a pattern for it. You may wonder – how big a challenge it might be, provided that it is the most simple jacket there is. But apparently, those simple collarless boxy jackets can be really different and there may be good and also bad patterns for them, and I needed a good one! After doing a bit of research, I found out that Vogue patterns have few pretty popular patterns that get used to make tweed jackets. V1830 and V7975 are mentioned quite often. But my problem is that I do not have a good access to Vogue patterns – I can purchase them online from US or UK based online stores, but both options mean long delivery times, customs fees and a load of hassle. I’ve gone through that few times and on one of those occasions I had purchased one more Chanel style jacket friendly Vogue pattern V8804, so at first I’d decided to try that one out.

V8804 theoretically is a very decent pattern. It features seemingly elaborate structure and three piece sleeves, like in a real life Chanel jacket. That was what drew me to this pattern. Unfortunately, when working on a toile, it became apparent that I did not have enough competence to actually adjust the fit so that this pattern would work for me. I actually had stopped before even installing sleeves – the main body of the jacket was off big time. Perhaps this pattern can work for some body types, but it did not work for me at all and I even couldn’t comprehend how to adjust it to make it work. So that one was abandoned.

Next in line was Vikisews Grace jacket pattern. I bought it a year ago, it was not a regular pattern, but so-called marathon kind of thing, i.e. the pattern was available for a limited and quite short period of time only. I purchased the pattern partly because it came together with extensive instructions about different interfacing methods for tweed jackets which I was curious to learn more about. But I had my doubts about the jacket design itself. That was a double-breasted jacket design and it looked very boxy with those wide shoulders. So I had been postponing working on it until now, and now there were no other options left anyway.

First things first, the toile had to be made. I needed to transform double-breasted front to single row of buttons, i.e. front pieces needed to be narrowed down. When I had the main body of the jacket with one sleeve installed, it started appearing to me that the back was too wide at the upper part. So I cut remaining sleeve opening a bit more open. But when the second sleeve got installed, it became clear very quickly that by doing that I had messed up entire geometry of the back. So that particular adjustment was not going to work at all. After few of these trials and errors I made a conclusion that the only actually needed adjustment was narrowing shoulders down by 0.5 cm. And with that I was prepared to actually try this pattern out. But first, not on tweed, but on this shiny jacquard.

Stitching the jacket up

This crazy shiny jacquard was one of my “weakness-of-the-moment” purchases. I do that sometimes – I’d see some kind of odd piece of fabric on sale and whether I need it or not, end up purchasing it. This was the last 1.8 m piece of a deadstock fabric at my local fabric store that went for 15 EUR, and I just couldn’t resist. At first I thought of making a wide sturdy A line midi skirt out of it. But while looking at myself in the mirror holding the fabric, I was seeing myself in a wallpaper, not a skirt. And then I was like – sure, a jacket it is!

This jacket is really simple, absence of collar makes it simple. I block-interfaced half of fabric and cut front and front facing pieces out of that interfaced fabric piece. Other pieces were cut and interfaced partially. And then, as usual, interfacing tape was attached to edges, corners and other important seams. At first I was unsure how to interface that wrinkled jacquard, and whether or not interfacing would even work. But it does – looks a bit funny, but does the job.

I cut sleeves shorter than designed to make 3/4 sleeves and attached my basic rounded pockets which were not part of the original design. And then it was just joining all pieces together. It was a pretty easy ride, really. To complete the boxy shape, I installed felt sleeve heads and shoulder pads. Then the lining was installed and finally I had to stitch button holes and attach the buttons. And with that this funky, shiny, boxy test jacket was complete!

For this jacket I used up 1.6 m of a deadstock piece of jacquard (I don’t even know its content, presumably it’s some kind of viscose/poly mix) and some 1.25 m of viscose blend lining in matching color. Pattern used here was Vikisews Grace. Other notions used for this project were: some 0.8 m of lightweight interfacing, few meters of interfacing tape, 2 felt sleeve heads, 2 shoulder pads, 4 buttons of 22 mm diameter, and coordinating thread (Gutermann no. 659). This jacket cost me 35 Eur. It was made in April, 2023.

So quite unintentionally this test project produced a very decent spring or summer jacket that will now live a life of its own. I think I’ll be happily wearing it with white jeans like here or more formal white pants. This kind of outfit perhaps can even work for the office, but more likely I’ll be wearing it in summer to a restaurant or a concert. We’ll see. But more importantly, now I know what kind of jacket this pattern produces, and now finally I’ll be able to make up my mind on whether or not I’ll be using it for an actual Chanel style jacket. I really don’t know why it takes me so long to actually commit to that project! Now it must be the trim that I’m so anxious about 🙂 Or… if I’m still unsure, for my next project I can always make another trench coat – have an absolutely awesome pink cotton lined up for it 🙂 So yeah, my plans continue going haywire, just as usual, but I guess, that’s where the most fun with this entire sewing exercise is for me!

Thanks for visiting my blog and I’ll see you next time!

~Giedre~