Sleeves

I had high hopes of finishing my jacket before Thursday, so that I could wear it to my sons' presentation on his bachelor thesis. It did not work out that way. But my son did fine and I’m a proud mum. It’s on such days that you realize time flies by so very, very fast.
It was not a good day to wear a jacket anyway. Warm and very high humidity after days of exceptional rain.
Where am I then with the jacket? The sleeves are inserted and it’s down to sewing the lining. 
The picture below shows the interfacing of the sleeves. At the upper part the pattern pieces are interfaced with a light weight fusible, the hem with a heavy weight fusible. I already did this when interfacing the body part, to do all the interfacing in one go. If you look closely you can see that I traced the essential points again (top of sleeve, end of seam) with carbon tracing paper.

After stitching I made long straight stitches to gather the top of the sleeve a bit.

The sleevecap I made as I did before, using a method that is described by Ann Rowley. This time I made some photos myself too.
A strip of batting fabric is used, about 20 centimeters long (8 inch) and 3.5 cm wide and pinned to the inside of the sleeve, with the edge of the batting to the edge of the seam allowance of the sleeve. For this jacket I used a thin batting, for a winter coat I would have used a bit thicker fabric.

The strip is stitched from the jacket side, just beside the existing stitch.

The batting is then folded over the seam and stitched in the ditch.



The protruding batting is cut away after this stitching.

I used thin, felt shoulderpads (the classic tailoring type) that I attached to the batting and at the end at the shoulder seam. In the photos below you can see the difference a shoulder pad makes. The effect differs with different fabrics. I’m not after the 80’s look with wide shoulders, but I like the look after adding a small shoulder pad

It might all be a bit much tailoring for a summer jacket, but it looks so much better. And it will wrinkle less too. I made a jacket years ago using quite a few of these techniques on a linen fabric. It’s been a much worn item in my closet, hardly wrinkles despite being linen and not showing any signs of wear either.

Browsing through my pictures to find this one was fun. So many clothes I had forgotten about (blush). This was from 2010! Yes, time flies….