Drama in a Jacket...

I made this jacket back at the end of April, before the weather was really cold enough for wool jackets, and some of you may have seen it pop up in my Flickr pool back on the 4th and 28th of May, during MMM13. I've really struggled to get attractive photos, so finally I'm just going to post what I have ;).

For so much drama (ie so much collar and shaping) in a jacket, it's (surprisingly) an Easy pattern (Vogue ratings), and only took about 16 hours spread out over about 10 days in a "that's good enough" frame of mind.  16 hours - does that sound a lot? The jacket really is an easy make, but each easy step takes time because no seam is left exposed (well none I can think of). Everything is flat felled or French seamed, darts are stitched down, and there's top stitching too. A good part of this time was also spent working out which parts of the (really big) pattern pieces represented what so I could adjust the fit.

My fabric is a 'hairy' kind of wool that I was lucky enough to find second hand: $12 for 2.3 metres minus a small rectangle in one corner.  The pattern called for 2.9m for my usual 12-14 size, but obviously the jacket can be made with less. To eke the jacket out my fabric I pieced the sleeves half way down and very slightly narrowed the lapels.  

This fabric felt unbearably itchy (the jacket is unlined) when I wore it over a t-shirt in early May, but it's perfectly fine over long sleeves and a scarf (phew!)

The pattern is V1263, a Donna Karan for Vogue pattern. You can see that the front extends into a ginormous shawl collar, and there are also side front dart seams extending into pockets that (mostly) hide in the lower collar facings. The upper back has princess seams, and the 'skirt' of the jacket has no side seams.

The darts on this jacket are absolutely glorious - darts to shape the collar around the neck, darts around the pockets, and darts to shape the 'skirt'. Love, love, love the darts.

 The other feature I love is the pockets - I love that they're nearly completely hidden on the inside behind the collar facing! AND they're functional.

It's described as very loose fitting, but that's not what you're seeing here...  I wanted a more exaggerated shape; snug up top and loose below (like a coat version of the Elisalex dress), so I consciously used the size band down from my usual (ie I went down to size 8-10) for the shoulders, neck and upper bodice.  To be perfectly honest it took me quite a lot of playing with paper pattern pieces to work out which parts of the paper pattern were going to end up being the shoulders, upper bodice and neck, but I'm glad to have spent the time working it out as I really like the shape I've ended up with:  it's fitted around my upper back and chest but not restrictive, and the original loose fit around the waist means I can wear all kinds of skirt shapes underneath.
 

It was a pleasant surprise that this fit me so well but I've been thinking about fit late at night lately instead of counting sheep. Years ago I used to be a size 10 in Vogue patterns, and I assumed my shoulders wouldn't have grown much since then... 


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And even though it's unrelated to this post, I'm simply busting to share some good news on the technology front :). 

For the past 6 months I haven't been able to see my navbar, haven't been able to touch my blog layout, haven't been able to see my dashboard, haven't been able to add or remove widgets - I've had really limited "publish a post" access and that's about it.  Finally last night I decided it was time to crack the problem - and I did it!  I can see everything now! 

Turns out my page views have gone up since last year (sweet). And turns out there were 17 comments awaiting moderation - I don't know why they didn't just publish automatically, but thank you, thank you if you were one of those commenters, and I'm sorry if you felt like you I didn't want your comment (not sweet).  I'm on the front foot now, and I'm going to try to stay that way.