Pocket flaps

I have not sewn a lot on my coat this week, only did the pocket flaps. There is another garment finished, but the photos are horrible. I will have to wait for daylight photos for that one. For the sake of photos it’s a shame that I make so many black garments.

 

This is one of the fnished flaps, it’s uneven by design. The left side is a bit shorter.

 

During construction I made the lining a tiny bit smaller, shown very well by Kenneth D. King in his Craftsy class on pockets. Before pressing you can see clearly the lining is smaller, the flap won’t lie flat.

The pocket flap after pressing, the seam of the fashion fabric is pressed to the back. In this way you will not see the lining on the side at all.

Slow progress

Making a coat is not a quick, instant gratification project. It’s more likely a project taking a few weeks. This of course depends of the amount of time you have for sewing in a day. During the week that is not too much for me, but I try to do a bit most days.

In the past weekend I basted all the seam lines, pinned the front, side and back together and decided on a bit more waist shaping.

The next step is interfacing the front and that’s mainly done now. I’m using methods from my favorite book on jacket construction (Tailoring, the classic guide to sewing the perfect jacket), which I wrote about a few times before. It describes the classic interfacing construction, the machine stitched variation and the fusible method. This time I opted for the second one, machine stitched interfacing. It also has a shoulder reinforcement. The shaping darts are pressed open and catch stitched to the interfacing. On the good side of the fabric only the straight stitches on the strips at the edges are visible. They are in the seam allowance though so won’t be visible later.

 

A few questions that were not answered yet (sorry, I’m not always good at answering in the comments, though of course I read them, will try to do better)

Where do I get my lingerie fabric and notions? Mostly from Kantje boord in Amsterdam. Another source is www.Merckwaerdigh.nl, an ebay store from a lady based in Rotterdam. My last bra (black and white) was made from one of her kits.

Do I know any courses to take (asked by Anna from Maastricht): I took courses in the past and have learned a lot by doing and experimenting. My courses were all in the Randstad, so no help to anyone living in Maastricht. There is a Dutch  lingerie forum you could ask for recommendations.

Which pattern did I use for my bra: The last one was a knock off, so no pattern used.

A facebook page was mentioned but I’m one of the few people that is not (yet?) on Facebook. There is only so much time in a day….

What is the fabric for the skirt? I don’t know the actual contents. There is certainly a man-made fibre in it. It feels like a viscose/cotton. Here is a detail picture.

Next project – a coat

After a lot of hesitation I decided a coat will be my next project. It’s not more complicated than a jacket, as one or two commenters said when I was deliberating what to sew two weeks ago, but it’s heavy, warm and still a lot of work. If I start it now, it will be ready by the time the weather calls for a warm coat. To be honest, I hope it’s ready and it will still take a while to wear it. I’ll be showing the steps I take (though not a tutorial) here, so if you feel like sewing a winter coat (Lilian?) perhaps you’re starting too. Sewing an hour or so each day will get it done….

This is the pattern, BurdaStyle 6845’. I’m using view A only shortened the pattern by 20 centimeters, which makes it about 10 centimeters longer than view B. Tonight I constructed the under collar, based on the instructions in Kenneth King’s course The fly front coat on Craftsy. I loved to watch this course. I will not make the coat of the class but Kenneth’s instructions can be applied to other coats as well and he’s always giving tips during construction.

My order of construction is perhaps strange, as I start with the collar which will be attached to the coat much later . This fabric is rather thick and I want to be sure that it works properly for what I want, which is the reason I started with the collar. Then I would know, prior to cutting the whole coat, how this fabric behaves and whether it would work for this pattern. I’m not short of fabric and I could choose another pattern if needed.

The under collar is interfaced with hair canvas, which is cut on the bias and stitched on the grain to the under collar. This pattern has a collar in two parts, so I applied the same technique to the small part that will be sewn to the neckline later. After sewing the seams the bulk is reduced at the crossing points and the seams are edgestitched. After stitching the hair canvas to the collar the seam allowances are cut off, which means no extra fabric/bulk.

Next step is construction of the upper collar and sew that to the under collar.

Lekala 4122 and a pencil skirt

Taking good photos of this jacket is difficult, it shows more pleats than actually there. There are a few little wrinkles, but it’s a close fitting jacket. I used a cardigan pattern and used it for a woven and I like the result of it. The fabrics were bought at the Utrecht fabric market last year. The skirt was almost finished last year as well, and I had more or less forgotten about it as for some reason I did not like it. Strange, because when I tried it on now I did not know what I disliked about it then.

For those who don’t know Lekala patterns: it’s a Russian site selling pdf patterns and you can enter your own measurements. Based on those measurements you get a pdf pattern made to your measurements. This was the first time I used one of their patterns. I bought 3 prior to taking drafting lessons and I wanted to see how it worked out. I’m quite happy with it. I made the neckline a bit higher, it was very, very low and the sleeves were very wide, so I changed that too. The pattern has a ruched front which I did not do.

The skirt is a basic pencil skirt, absolutely no idea which pattern I used. The fabric is quite special.

It’s finished with hong kong binding and Petersham ribbon in the waist.

Purely by coincidence I saw this jacket online today (style.com) from the Donna Karan spring 2015 collection. Its lines are very similar to the Lekala pattern.

It’s been a very busy two weeks and I know I have not answered a few questions. I will get back to those in a later post.

Meetup

Do I need to say more?

Renee (Miss Celies pants) spent the last days of her European trip in Amsterdam and she took the the time for a few meetups. As she was here on her honeymoon I felt honored she made time for this. I met her at Kantje Boord, the famous lingerie shop here together with my friend Valerie and had a lovely lunch afterwards. We were lucky the weather was nice again so we could be outside.
Another meetup was on Monday, but unfortunately I could not make it to that one. I’m sure Renee will tell you about it all when she’s back.

 

She took a good haul of fabric and notions home with her. Renee: I’m looking forward to seeing what you make of this and it was such a pleasure to meet you again.