Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Construction of jacket - 1

Throught the comments I learned that the motorcycle jacket is still popular. And a lot of different fabrics are going to be used: leather, silk brocade and my version in a bouclĂ© like fabric. Looking forward seeing the different styles on the blogs. I’ve decided to make it not too complicated, and won’t quilt the fabric after all. I’m going to use a few techniques I used before on jackets, and even though I’ve posted on these before, I’ll show a bit again in this and next posts.

It will not be a complete tutorial, just my way of doing things in the hope the end result is a jacket I will love to wear.

 

This fabric ravels a lot. After marking the seam lines with red carbon paper I serged all seams with a 4 thread stitch. Of course I checked that the carbon tracing was not visible from the right side of the fabric. Not pressing too hard when marking is important.

 

 

After that I started with the back and sewed the side back to the center back, pressed the seams open and catchstitched them to lay flat.

 

In this picture the left seam is done already, you can see that the right seam does not lay flat, and I did press with a press cloth and water.

 

From muslin fabric I cut a back stay. Being very short on fabric the curve is a bit steep, I normally would have made a more gradual curve.

 

First I pinned the stitching lines together and then machine basted the back stay with long straight stitches.

 

That's how far I got, next time the front.

 

An answer to Karin’scomment on Walthamstow market: yes there are a lot of polyester fabrics, you have to look for nice ones. Think it depends on what the sellers have at a certain moment. The black/white was from there, as some of the prints. And most are manmade fibres, though I don’t know which fibres exactly. But I skipped the really very bad feeling polyester ones. With prices from .50p to 3 pounds a meter you can’t go very wrong. I'll wash everything first and see how it comes out. First lot is done and looked good. If a fabric won’t behave nicely, it will be muslin fabric.

4 comments:

  1. You are further along than I am. I still need to cut another muslin tomorrow. Motorcycle jackets are everywhere so we'll be right in style.

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  2. It's nice to see the little details of how you are constructing your jacket. It all helps me to learn.

    Good luck with your fabrics. At such cheap prices, you are right, you cannot go far wrong!

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  3. I'm looking forward to how this project turns out. Fabric at those prices are a steal!

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  4. the fabric looks a different colour in the photos - gosh you have made progress that was folded up on your table on Sunday. Look forward to seeing the end result.

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