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| View of Cascade range as seen from tracks in Durham, CA |
It was in summer when I got the pattern and fabric for
Simplicity 1947, a men's casual jacket with a bit of a 50s edge. I am making this for my partner Mike. Upon consult we are omitting the horizontal topstitching details, the waist tabs, and the hood. I have chosen a grey corduroy for the jacket and a checkered shirting in white and blue for the pockets; I will also use it for bias binding the seam edges.
I fabricated this garment in November. It took about one week for preliminaries (layout, cutting, marking), two weeks for construction (stitching and seam finishing), and about one more week for finishing (final topstitching, hand stitching).
There was a rough patch where the sleeves were too long. I cut them off, shortened the sleeve, and applied new cuffs (yes both of them ugh).
Waiting until a garment is complete to check the fit often results in extra work, especially if you have to rip out finished seams to correct the fit. It's very important to try on your garment at certain points during construction to check the fit and refine it. Pin-fitting along the way is easy to do and can save a lot of time in the end. -Mary Ray, Threads Magazine "10 Better Sewing Habits"
Lesson Learned.
The day Mike opened up his holiday gift he wore it. The fit is good. I am happy with the hand of the cloth. Time will tell whether the seam finishes hold up in the wash.
My Review on PatternReview
This project took me the most amount of time of any garment so far. Overall I like the pattern, the fit is good, the styling is neat.
I made this as a holiday gift for my partner Mike. I made him a size L; he's a 40R. I made this using cotton corduroy; for the pockets and seam finishes I used cotton shirting. I used a denim needle. For hand stitching, I used a thimble.
For this jacket we chose to do view B and omit the horizontal topstitching, the tabs at the waist, and the hood.
The first regret is using corduroy and cutting it with shears. There's a lot of cutting and corduroy is TOUGH like denim. I complained so much afterwards about my hand and forearm that Mike bought me a rotary cutter and mat for the holidays. If you have to use shears on bottom-weight corduroy then DEFINITELY do your cutting over a couple of days.
The second regret is my choice of seam finish. I honestly think I did it wrong, for starters - I applied bias strips it like binding on a neck edge, rather than a 'hong-kong finish' where the back side is ironed out so it catches much more easily. OOPS. After the garment was washed I went back and restitched the bias strips by hand for maybe an hour.
My third regret is not checking the sleeve length. The jacket hangs off the shoulders in an unusual way, so I didn't thinking testing the sleeve against an existing garment would work. There's a lot of pattern pieces, so there was no way I'd make a muslin/test garment. I just dove right in and never made Mike do a test fit... until the cuffs were on AND topstitched. The sleeves were two or three inches too long: OOPS. I chopped them off, shortened the sleeves and took them in, and made new cuffs. It looks OK now. This particular error is also my own fault.
My fourth and final regret is the sloppy job of easing the lower edge to the waistband. It's not something other people would notice (I hope!) but once it was all pressed and I looked at it, I saw my error. This was the last step and by this point I was just over it, so the uneven easing stays.
The other parts of the jacket I had trouble with include getting the points on the collar and collar band to match (this may be the fault of the corduroy being such a wide wale). I had some trouble with getting even topstitches, but there's SO MUCH that by the end I was more comfortable. I also had trouble visualizing the construction steps of the flange - I ended up doing seam finishes on parts that were completely enclosed.
In the end, I think it's a nifty-looking garment and I wish I got to see it on Mike more.
I like the look of the corduroy and the construction details: the topstitching (I used the heavy buttonhole thread), hand buttonholes, even the flashy check lining fabric. I love the flange design and the exposed zipper with the big collar.
I didn't have any more trouble than usual with the instructions - I grade them a B. I look forward to doing the matching SuedeSays trousers.
