Rainbow jacket: troubles with sleeves

Building this jacket hasn't been completely smooth sailing.  I spent a good long time on discovering, and then slowly solving, sleeve problems.

First, once sewed together and body tested, the sleeves felt much too stiff and somewhat too tight.  The solution to that was not particularly difficult:  bit by bit, without disassembling the already-made sleeves, I cut away nearly all the quilting.

By the time I finished, the only little bit of blue underlining left on each sleeve was about 5 cm at the cuff, and what had already been caught in the vertical seams.  Those two lines of what remained in the last quilting lines after the rest was pinked away, in the pic above, were also removed.  I also re-stitched the back sleeve seam about 1/4" wider, adding 1/2" to the circumference.  Not necessary, but an uncomfortable garment is one that doesn't get worn, right?

The second sleeve problem was equally unanticipated and rather harder to solve.  Call me naive, but I was under the impression that if the fabric stripe or check of the body piece is matched to the undersleeve, it'll similarly match all the way along the sides and at the sleeve cap. In theory, it should.  In this case, if I'd used the single piece sleeve of NL6516, perhaps it would have.  But I used a sleeve from V7975, and as it turned out it was too shallow.   Here's how:

At left are the back body pieces.  I numbered the armscye blue stripes: there are four of them.  At right are the sleeve pieces, and the blue stripes for the back half of the sleeve's armscye curve are also numbered: there are only three. The fourth stripe needed for a proper fit is missing, and the sleeve cap is too flat and too short to fit in the body correctly.  Oh, I'm sure I could've stretched and strong armed it (pun intended!) into the armscye, but the stripes wouldn't have matched, it wouldn't have looked good, and it very likely wouldn't have felt good in wear.  So how did I solve this problem?  I increased the size of the sleeve cap.

I sewed a strip of fabric two blue stripes high just above stripe number two of the upper sleeve.  I had just enough small pieces of fabric left over to do that.  After that, I really winged it, tacking the sleeve in tiny little increments here and there at important match points, eventually sewing it in by hand with very small stitches, and only after it was all in to my satisfaction (not perfect, mind you, but acceptable!) I machine sewed the lot just inside the hand stitching, for security.  You can just see that horizontal seam in the sleeve above, it's in the purple-magenta stripe.

 After many days, the sleeves are finally in. I have learned my lesson!
I free-handed the cap increase in the lining, and pleated rather than eased the cap into the lining body.  I always pleat out the sleeve cap excess in my linings - it's easy, quick, and comes with no functional penalty.  How about you?

Here's where I diverge from the classic cardigan jacket construction: the lining is a standard one, with an ease pleat in the back and one side seam left open, and it'll be "bagged" into the jacket.    

The Rainbow jacket: early stages

For my second garment of 2014 I turned to a lovely little piece of colourful wool bouclé acquired a couple of years ago at Ottawa's fall Fabric Flea Market.  With its yellow, orange, red, light blue, violet, and navy, all it lacks is a bit of true green to make it a little piece of rainbow, and it shimmers like it, too.  The piece was small, so when I got it I was probably thinking of a skirt;  but when I laid it out, I thought, well, it just might be enough for a little jacket at that.  A rainbow Technicolor Dreamcoat sort of little jacket.

The piece was really small for a jacket:  42" wide by 53" long (110 x 135 cm).  That's too small to make anything with a collar or facing. Above, the two patterns lying in front of the little length of what is actually a very yummy and cheerful piece of wool hint at the direction I decided to take:  a "Chanel-style", aka, "French cardigan" jacket.  The upside of this kind is that it's lined to the edge:  what you see is all you need, in terms of the fashion fabric.  The downside is that, should you decide to follow the classic method, it's, ahem, just a tad time consuming.

Most of the time, to make the C-style jacket people choose either V7975 (at right in the photo above) or V8259 (the Claire Shaeffer's custom couture collection, reviewed on Pattern Review but no longer available for sale from Vogue).  Both have shoulder princess seams, but V7975 has a two-piece sleeve while V8259 has the classic vented three-piece sleeve, plus very detailed construction instructions.

Way back when, four years ago almost to the day, as part of my participation in "Go Chanel or Go Home", I made a very red boucle version using V7975. Live pics are linked via my pattern review here, though if you're not a member you likely won't be able to see them, as non-members are limited to only the past 6 months of reviews.  But they're also on the blog here.

So, how did that early red version stand the test of time? The jacket itself, pretty well, except.... The hooks I picked were of such appallingly bad quality that two broke off almost immediately.  I replaced them with a separating gold-coloured zipper that matches the exposed zipper of the skirt.  I still wear the jacket, usually with black slacks, although it really feels at least a size too big now - I probably made it a bit too big to begin with, and have dropped a size or two since. I considered unpicking the hem and taking it in, but my husband - aka the critical eye and voice of reason - objected, saying that there's nothing wrong with a loose-fitting jacket. He's right, right?  The matching red boucle skirt, I almost never wear.  Too much red all at once, I think.

Anyway, back to the project at hand.  Over time, I discovered that armscye princess patterns tend to yield a better fit for me than the shoulder princess.   Therefore, for this version I turned to New Look 6516, a pattern I'd used very long ago for a jacket I still love though it was an early and very flawed creation; despite that it's one that fits me better than any other I've made.

To cut to the chase, I tested the possibilities by laying pattern pieces on the folded fabric, then cut out underlining pieces out of lightweight cotton broadcloth, laid them out, and basted them onto the fabric.  Of course, with the very obvious check pattern, the aim was to have the lines match up across the body and sleeves.

Cotton quilting/underlining, basted onto fashion fabric.

Above's the layout.  The body pieces weren't difficult to place - basically, all body hems were placed on a blue check stripe and that was that.  Matching the sleeves was a bit trickier, and, I thought, as long as I match the undersleeve check to the side seam check, all would be well.  Right?  Well... yes... almost right. More on that later.

One little thing about NL6516 is that it has a single-piece "tube" sleeve. A tube sleeve would not have fit on this measly little scrap of fabric.  This is counter-intuitive, I know - a single-piece item should fit into a smaller area than two pieces - but in this case, the sleeve pieces had to share real estate with side back body pieces, and the ONLY way to make them play nice was to use a two-piece sleeve.  Which I did, using the sleeve of V7975.

In the Chanel construction technique, one is advised to cut out the FF (fashion fabric) pieces with 1" seam allowances before quilting, since bouclé can be of a very loose weave.  Obviously, such allowances were not within any realm of possibility here, so, to make things easier to handle under the machine needle, I cut the piece in half just below the hem line of the body pieces to the right, and quilted everything without cutting it all up into all the individual pattern pieces.

So far so good?  Yea.  The red bemberg lining at left is what I picked to go with it;  I'd thought of navy blue originally, but a good match wasn't available at the store, and my second attempt at dyeing the light grey lining I'd used for the navy velvet jacket failed utterly.  [And I think I know why:  it turns out that my mystery grey lining is acetate, a type of cellulose-based man-made fabric that's sufficiently different from rayon that dyeing it is not as straightforward. I dyed it a nice dark blue, then washed and dried it:  it returned to light grey.  Live and learn....].

After the quilting, I placed the tissue pattern piece on each quilted piece, adjusted orientation to match its lateral (left/right) mate, cut it out, and immediately serged all edges.  Probably a bit of overkill as this particular bouclé wasn't especially ravelly, but it safeguarded every little millimeter I had:  better safe than sorry!

Here's the result, ready for assembly:

Above, you can see that the body pieces are pattern-matched with respect to the hem line. The undersleeve placed at the centre is matched to the side seam lines of side front & side back. 

And the top sleeve pieces have their horizontal stripes matched to the stripes of the under sleeves.

Yea.  I do believe I'm going to get a jacket out of this little scrap of wool!!!!

Midnight blue velvet jacket: done!

I truly enjoyed constructing this item from the start: pattern planning and adjusting, to its finish: planning the wardrobe pieces to go with it. I'm happy to have added another pattern to my go-to pile, and a bit of experience on that particular type of collar.

NL6013 with silk twill that could be a perfectly matching dress. Instead of a fashion fabric belt loop, I made a concealed thread loop to button up the fronts, on the rare occasions I'll wish to do so.   

Since I have more time right now than normally, I had some fun adding details not in the NL6013 pattern. On the front, I added angled double welt flap pockets and a single welt breast pocket.  Does it reflect my inspiration? Reasonably well, I believe.

To the back I added a double half-belt and buttoned sleeve vents.  Nice?  I think so.

I also took the time to give the invisible portions a little oomph.  Not only did I interface the under collar with fusible tailoring, but I also added a softer knit-based fusible to the fronts and side fronts, facings and upper collar.

Jacket body, inside out.  All fronts are fused with knit fusible, under collar with tailoring fusible.  The pockets and their pocket bags are already completed.

I also fused the sleeve and jacket hem.  Because I didn't want the velvet to rumple like a bathrobe, I added cotton half-underlining aka backstay to the upper parts of the back and side backs.   

Jacket, complete and ready for lining.  I used quilting batting for sleeve heads. Sleeve and hem are tentatively turned up. 

The lining and facing, ready to be combined with the outer jacket.  

As you can no doubt deduce, I constructed the lining (plus self-drafted back neck facing) and upper collar as a whole, and then combined this with the jacket by (almost) bagging the lining: actually I sewed the collars and front facings in one go, then the back hem to back lining as a separate seam.  Because the sleeve hems were already turned up, attaching the lining by machine at the sleeve hems wasn't really feasible, so I did that by hand.  I also pick-stitched around all the edges:  fronts, collar, hem, and sleeve hems.

So, that's my first project of 2014! When the temps crawl out of the  -27C deep-freeze we're having right now, I'll try to get an outdoor live-body pic to add here.  :)