Class samples V

Oops!  Time certainly does fly.  I had intended to post this last bit on class samples a while back.  Unfortunately, after several weeks of intense sewing for a deadline, so many other things had fallen by the wayside and needed to be attended to.  This, that and the other thing, and blog posting was pushed to the bottom of the list.

So, last, but not least in the samples for classes - pants, blouse (fitting classes) and jacket (tailoring class).  The blouse is OOPVogue 7063 with a scooped neckline that I "borrowed" from the Pamela's Patterns Perfect T-shirt and finished off with a bias edge.  I have no idea what the fabric is - possibly a piece of curtain fabric.  The cream shade worked for the grouping.  Rather boring.  Initially I was going to use some rows of decorative stitches to perk it up, then decided that I didn't have the patience to sit and stitch those.  Found some butterfly lace stuff in the drawer, liberated a few of the butterflies and hand sewed those on.  Very low tech.

The pants  are a combination of Vogue 1166 and 2532.  They're a stretch wool that I bought as a remnant to go with another jacket, so it was a lovely surprise that they would work with something else.  Of course, picking a remnant, holding it up to yourself  to determine whether it will be enough for a pair of pants is not necessarily the best method of judging the amount of fabric.  Turned out that I was 1 inch sort of fabric before even turning up the hem.  No problem!  (Right!)  There was a slice of fabric left at the fold that I managed to chop up into strips and fashion cuffs.  The whole mess on the inside was covered by a strip of the lining fabric.  (And yes, I lined these.)
Now the jacket is rather a long story...

I do believe that I briefly mentioned this jacket almost a year ago.  To begin at the beginning...
Two years ago I decided to sew a suit for Easter.  Made the skirt.  Made the blouse.  (Almost) made the jacket.  The outer shell was done.  The lining was ready to be sewn in.  All was well.  I decided that I needed keyhole buttonholes.  Now my machine makes very ugly keyhole buttonholes.  Well, I would just pop over to the store and beg to use one of the very fancy machines that make lovely keyhole buttonholes.  I made samples.  Everything was going well.  Time to actually sew buttonholes on the jacket.  First buttonhole - perfect.  Second buttonhole - perfect.  Third buttonhole - huge wad of thread build-up and one big mess.  I persevered through the fourth buttonhole, which was - perfect.  Attempts to remove the thread mess just made a worse mess.  I was almost in tears.  I packed up and went home (calling that super-duper machine all kinds of bad names).  I knew I'd think of something to save the jacket.  The first thing that came to mind was making use of the sample buttonholes that looked beautiful.  I thought that if I cut out shapes around the buttonhole, lifted out the damaged one, then inset the same shape and satin stitched around, I could make do.  And to make it look like a design thing, I'd do the same treatment on the second and third (damaged) buttonholes.  I just made a worse mess.

At that point the jacket and all that went with it got dumped in a bin and for Easter I was jacketless.  Last year, after much time to think, I came up with another solution.  Mind you, I only had teeny scraps of fabric left - such is the problem of buying remnants.  There really was no room for error.  I decided to cut off the strip of front with the buttonholes and replace them with slot buttonholes.  So...

Scraps left for redesigning

I measured and measured and quaked and measured and finally cut strips, matching the herringbone pattern.  Interfaced one lot of strips to mimic the layers that I already had going on inside the jacket.  I stitched, leaving openings for the buttonholes.

Then the two layers were put together and the openings were slip stitched.

(Um - did I mention that the fabric is silk herringbone?  Colour - pale blue and the binding is a pale green.  The skirt that goes with this is in the green with blue at the waistband.)  At this point I ran out of time, back in April (?) and the whole business went back in the bin.  Again I was jacketless for Easter.  It was definitely time to get this jacket done, and it happened to work with the pants that I was sewing, so...
The really scary part now was cutting off a piece of jacket and replacing it with my strip of buttonholes.  The binding seemed to grow as I was removing it, only to make me even more nervous about how the end result was going to look.  Lots more measuring, praying, more measuring and I finally got up the nerve to chop the jacket.

Lined up the buttonholes and stitched on the new strips.

Laid down the old front to mark and cut the neckline.

Cut the facing side to size.  And at this point I rather ran out of steam for picture-taking.  Then it was a matter of reapplying my binding, inserting the lining into the jacket and I was finally done!

Originally I had bought shell buttons for this jacket.  While I was removing them from the cards, one button snapped in half, and I questioned the practicality of using such fragile buttons on a jacket.  I found these old greyish buttons in my stash -just the right number and just the right size!
...and in case anyone is interested, the pattern for this jacket is:

Burda 8949