Jacket with White Satin Trim Part 1

Were you wondering about all the white satin trim from a previous post?
I saw this interesting jacket, Vogue 1493, and saw that it made use of some techniques I hadn't tried before. I decided to see if I could make it work.  Note that this is listed as an "advanced" difficulty pattern, a good sign that there's one or more steps here that is challenging to make work right.

   I choose a teal stretch denim for the jacket and white satin for the trim.  That gives a lot more contrast that the colors of the jacket on the front of the pattern envelope, but then, subtle isn't really my style.

Thank goodness I had extra fabric!  I think it came off the end of the bolt.  I made enough cutting errors that I had to redo some things and I ended up needing all the fabric I had.

As described in a previous post, making the white satin trim proved to be the difficult step.  The satin is made into 1/2" bias tape and then sewn to the lower sleeve sections and the front band in a pattern that looks random.

The pattern gives very detailed instructions for making the "random" design of lines of trim.  In this sleeve section, I've traced the lines from the pattern.  The pattern also specifies the order in which the lines of trim are to be sewn.  The right and left sleeves are different, as are the right and left front bands.

Sewing on the white trim proved to be fairly straight forward.  It did involve a great deal of top stitching.  Here's a lower sleeve section in process.

 

The front bands were easier than the sleeves.  There were just and many lines of trim, but most of them were shorter.  Here's the front band, lined with more white satin, ready to be sewn onto the jacket.

Come back next week and see how the jacket goes together, now that most of the trim is done.

Raincoat Part 1

I live in Alabama and it does rain here.  I don't have a proper raincoat that fits and it seemed like the time to remedy that situation.  Besides, I found Vogue 1564 at the fabric store and it seemed like a very interesting pattern.

There's a very limited selection of fabrics available in my town, so I've been looking for online sources for fabrics.  An search for raincoat fabric turned up Fashion Fabrics Club out of St. Louis, Missouri.  I ordered a nylon fabric with a waterproof coating on the back.  The fabric as reasonably priced, arrived in a good amount of time, and was as described on the website.  I plan to use then for future purchases.

The coat does have a lining, fortunately, I had some suitable lining material left over from another project sitting in my stash.

Once I got the pattern home and started really looking at it, I discovered that it really wasn't going to create a really waterproof garment, just one that was most water resistant.  That might work fine if I was looking for something to keep off a list misting rain between the car and the grocery store, but I really did want something that could handle a heavy rain and keep me dry.  The fabric I bought is waterproof, so the challenge is to keep the seems and front opening from leaking.  The original pattern calls for latch closures -- 8 of them.  I did find some at my local store, but they were about $5 each.  Ouch!  Not only are they expensive, they don't keep out the rain very well.  Buttons aren't any better in terms of keeping water out.  Also, the welt pockets where the water can just run right down into the coat?  They have to go. 

I got this garment out of the closet as inspiration and a source of ideas.  This is the top for sailor's foul weather gear, more or less designed to keep you from getting more than just damp while in a car wash or a storm at sea.  One of the features of this coat is storm flaps protecting a zipper to close the front.  There's one flap on each side of the zipper and they close together with Velcro, completely covering the zipper.  The second feature is that the seams are taped on the backside with special seam sealing tape.  The original pattern called for flat felled seams, which does help with water intrusion, but a flat felled seam sealed with tape is waterproof.  After surveying the available options online I chose this heat-sealed tape.  It's designed for garments, not tents or packs.  The pockets on the foul weather gear are completely external.  You can get things in and out of them without compromising the waterproof integrity of the coat.  Finally, the sleeves have adjustable tabs with Velcro so they can be tightened around your arms and leak a lot less.  Fortunately, the original sleeves already have decorative tabs, which can be adjusted to a new purpose.

Now that the basic design is set and all the materials have been decided on an obtained, it's time to move on to making the garment while maintaining the waterproof integrity of  the fabric.  We'll take that up next week.

Spoiler alert: The day after I finished this coat, it rained about 2" and  I had errands to run around town.  That's a serious test of a raincoat and this one passed!

Jeans

 I like a good pair of jeans that really fit.  I've found that I need to make the jeans myself to achieve that good fit.  Last week, I discussed how to make that good fit happen.  This week, I'll talk about how to achieve that classic 5-pocket styling in a pair of jeans.

I used an out of print Kwik-Sew pattern, but McCall's 5894 is an current pattern for classic jeans.  Jeans are different from slacks in a number of ways.  First, they feature a back yoke, rather than just a single piece with darts in the back.  Second, the pocket arrangements are different and a lot more flattering on most people.  Finally, the seams are both reinforced and celebrated with top stitching.

The back pockets of jeans usually have some decorative stitching, but it's a great place for adding embroidery.  It's easy to embroider anything you like before the pockets are attached.  Denim is a nice heavy material and can support even quite heavy stitching.  For this pair of jeans I chose a design featuring calla lilies.  Often, I make the pocket designs the mirror reverse of each other, but with this nearly symmetric design, I made the pockets identical.

Top stitching is important to the classic look of jeans.  Top stitching works best with special top stitching thread.  I've tried a couple of kinds and the Coats and Clark thread works best for me.  I can even use it with a regular jeans needle, rather than needing to use the special top stitching needle.  There's a lot of switching back and forth between regular thread and the top stitching thread in making the jeans.  I've read that some people with more than one sewing machine will set up one with dark thread and one with top stitching thread.  In either case, regular bobbin thread to match the fabric is used for all the stitching except the embroidery.

Here, the coin pocket is attached to the pocket lining.  The pocket lining should be made of some much thinner material than denim.  I generally grab some polyester-cotton blend broadcloth out of my stash that mostly matches the color of the denim I'm using.

Lots of different thread went into making these jeans.  Just for fun, I collected them all for a group photo.  There's 7 colors of embroidery thread, plus black embroidery bobbin thread.  There's two colors of regular sewing thread.  I used the orange for the basting to check fit, as described last week, and finally, white top stitching thread.  Wow!  That's 11 different threads!

As for the rest of the details of making jeans?  It's easy, just follow the pattern directions and change threads a lot.

Come back next Saturday for more Fun with a Sewing Machine!