Sewing In a Time Of Epidemic, or, The (Not-)Wedding Guest Jacket Completed

Is this the most "fiddling while Rome burns" thing I have ever written? Possibly. Truthfully, though, for most of us there comes a point when you have done all the things you CAN do that will actually make a difference to the current situation, and then you are left with too much time on your hands. At that point, you can either use that time to work yourself up in a frenzy of anxiety over the things that are happening that you CAN'T change or affect, which will make you feel awful and yet also not improve the situation in any way; or you can distract yourself at least some of the time. My second favourite distraction (nothing will ever beat reading to first favourite) is of course sewing. If I end up documenting sewing my way to a whole new wardrobe over this spring/summer and burning through half my stash in the process: well, so be it.

So, let me kick off with a completed project I've talked about before: the (Not) Wedding Guest Jacket. I last posted about it at muslin stage as I prepared to make it to wear to a family wedding in April. Alas, by the time I was even halfway through construction it already looked unlikely I'd be able to attend, and at this point the wedding has been postponed until 2021.

Nevertheless, I decided to keep going to finish the jacket, partly for the distraction, but mostly because I'm not someone who keeps a pile of part-finished sewing projects: I tend to work on things consecutively rather than concurrently. I really wanted to finish this before I moved on, and I wanted to finish it as nicely as possible, because I do think it is still a fun garment and a useful addition to my wardrobe.

McCalls 7513 cover art. I made the modelled version (A) with the pleated peplum.

As I described in my last post, I had decided to make McCall's 7513, a semi-fitted jacket with a peplum, with the variations in the pattern being mostly in the length and style of the peplum. I made the version in the modelled image, A, with the shorter, pleated peplum, although I left off that little band you can see on the back. I made no other significant changes to the design that weren't about fit or comfort. However, I did make a great many adjustments, after running through multiple bodice muslins, as described previously, and then subsequently many, MANY sleeve muslins.

Front view of my version of McCall's 7513 on my tailor's dummy

As far as the fit adjustments go, I started with the things I now tend to do automatically: rounded back, squaring and narrowing the shoulder, and adding length to the bodice. As I mentioned in my last post I also changed the front waist darts to shoulder princess seams, matching the construction of the back, because I thought this fit better and was more aesthetically pleasing.

Side view, which shows the peplum a little more clearly

I have to admit I struggled more than usual with adjusting the waist. As you can see on the envelope cover, the jacket is intended to be very nipped in at the waist. Great theory, shame about my actual waist measurement! I ended up grading out from the smallest size in my pack (14) at the shoulder and neck to the largest (22) at the waist, which is ridiculous and produced some wacky looking pattern pieces. Also, the front and back are supposed to ease together, and on my tailor's dummy this makes it look weirdly blouson at the waist seam -- it's not in real life!

Back view

After my last post I also spent a LOT of time figuring out the fit of the sleeves. Although this turned out to be a lot of effort, I learned a huge amount from doing so.

I had started out by doing my ususal large bicep adjustment without thinking too much about it. I have always historically done this adjustment using the pivot and slide method. If you've ever used this method, you'll know that if you make more than a tiny adjustment, the pivot/slide process of making the sleeve wider also results in a much flatter sleeve cap. After a lot of googling (and seam ripping), and some helpful advice from online sewing friends, I discovered that I was to a very large extent creating my own sleeve twist problems by not restoring the height of the cap after the adjustment. The shortened length of the cap drags the sleeves askew in wear. The fix is luckily really simple: stop doing that! On the plus side, I've got a fix now for a sleeve problem I've had in nearly every woven long sleeve garment I've ever made. On the minus side, it's galling to realize that it was always entirely a problem of my own creation. Oops!

I would say 80% of the twist was resolved by re-doing the bicep adjustment so I got the extra width but kept the original sleeve cap height. I then got another 10% by attempting a forward shoulder adjustment for the first time. I want to refine how I use this adjustment a little more but the 1cm adjustment I did on this occasion seemed to make a visible difference. And finally, I added just a tiny bit of extra room at the elbow (because apparently I have big elbows, who knew) and that resolved the twist another percentage point or so more. I still feel like the sleeves want to twist a tiny bit, but nothing like they did before, and only in the way that a straight, undarted sleeve will always want to twist a bit with the more complicated shape of an arm inside.

A close-up of the fabric. The shiny part is created by the silver thread in the brocade catching the light.

I also want to talk more specifically about the fabric. The pattern I ended up with was all curves and angles, because of the aforementioned fit adjustments and princess seams. I made some limited effort to pattern match when I was cutting out, but I definitely did not have enough fabric to really make a solid effort at it, and also, frankly, pattern matching perfectly across curved seams often feels beyond my spatial reasoning capabilities.

On the left, one of the few places the "stripe" actually lines up. Not going to lie, this does look better, certainly in close up. Most of the rest of the garment, the seam "matching" looks like the image on the left. /o\

But why am I pattern matching, you might be thinking? Well, that's because when you're up close to the fabric, it's a stripe. About a quarter of the way through construction, I panicked. As I was sewing, the fact that the stripe matching was terrible seemed really glaring and I felt like the jacket was going to look hideous. But then as soon as I stepped back from the sewing to look at the jacket from a normal viewing distance, I calmed down again, because I don't think the overwhelming impression at a normal viewing distance is of a badly matched stripe. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most people wouldn't consider it a stripe at all at a glance from normal viewing distance.

Would the overall finish of the jacket have been better if I'd done a better job of pattern matching the stripe? I mean, maybe? If I'd had a lot more fabric and spent more time on it, and above all else if I had cut the fabric out single layer, I might have produced something a bit more stripe matched, and maybe the jacket overall would have looked just a little more beautiful and better made. As it was I had to do some pattern tetris just to get the pattern onto the fabric I had, and I am not sure that I cared enough about this particular garment to go to all that effort. This feels "good enough" for this project.

The lining fabric, the faux Hong Kong seams (bottom) and the bias edged hem (on the right)

One final change I made to the pattern that was also driven by the fabric was that the pattern calls for the bodice and sleeves to be fully lined while the peplum is left unlined. I picked a white lining with a subtle circular jacquard for the bodice/sleeve lining, which I like a lot. Initially I was enthusiastic about leaving the peplum unlined because the wrong side of this fabric is even more startlingly shiny than the right side because of the silver embroidery thread. I thought flashes of that would be fun.

However, as I was constructing and periodically trying on the shell, I realized the wrong side of the fabric was HORRIBLY itchy. Just the thought of the unlined peplum accidentally coming into contact with bare skin for an instant was appalling. The right side is fine -- the wrong side is death by a thousand prickles. So I interlined the peplum using the fake hong kong finish edges (where you cut the lining a little wider and fold it over the cut edges of the main fabric) and added a bias tape edge to the hem to finish it.

And then I pranced around the room in my jacket with my camera clicker taking a million photos. Truly awful.

Overall, I am pretty pleased with this jacket! I think it looks great with jeans so I am not sorry I own it as an option for any future going out sort of occasion, even if the original event I made it for did not go ahead. And who knows, maybe it can be part of my outfit for my family member's wedding when she eventually ties the knot next year.

Next up in my sewing room: a super easy summer dressing gown, which I have actually nearly finished already.

In the meantime, I hope everybody reading is well and stays well, and that you all find your own healthy distractions to keep your mind occupied while we all struggle through this period of our lives.