Almost there

It was a lovely long weekend here, with gorgeous weather. Had the weather been worse the jacket would probably have been finished by now, but we took the opportunity to go cycling and enjoy the weather in the garden.

A few answers to questions or comments to a few previous posts:

Faye asked whether the tailoring board is the june tailorboard. Yes it is, and I’ve used it a few times now in constructing the jacket, and I’m sooo happy with it.

Ann-Marie asked about extra costs involved in importing from the USA: yes there are extra costs involved for customs and VAT (BTW). As I said: I could’t find a European source for this, but still think that all together it’s value for money.

Then there were several questions on the dressform: I made it in a workshop, so I don’t have the instructions how to do it, we followed the instructors guidance. The bottom is wood with a piece of pvc pipe in it. The stand was ready for us, we didn’t make it.

The workshop was on 3 Saturday mornings, 2 of these were used for making the clones of each other. At home we had to make it more sturdy by adding tape at the inside, which was really taking a long time. The last morning it was finished with the outer layers, which was not too much work.

This is a link to several instructions making a clone of yourself. A bit down there are 4 links to different methods. The last one, paper-tape dressform, is most like the method we used.

The fit of the dressform is pretty accurate I think, it certainly isn’t far off.

More details on the jacket

The notched collar was constructed by sewing the collar first. The under collar was cut at the bias. First the long side is sewn and understitched at the under collar, then the sides of the collar are sewn. I checked for turn of cloth and made the necessary changes to the collar, in fact made the under collar a bit smaller in the neckline.

Under collar is sewn to jacket and upper collar to facings, sewing to the corner as much as possible.

The next step is sewing the center front side, without making the corner of the lapel. I put a pen in to show that this is still open. The lapel and the center front are understitched too, switching sides at the point the fold line meets center front.

Last step is sewing the short part of the lapel, and sewing approximately 1 cm of the collar too. Black is too difficult to make pictures, and as this is not a test garment, I couldn’t use a different color thread. Next time when not using a a dark fabric, I’ll try to get better pictures. But I found this methode easy to do with great results.