Too Many Learning Experiences

Here's the jacket as of now. The only thing left to do is buttonholes & buttons and to attach the lining at the armholes. The fabric you see underneath is the lining and will also be a dress. The camera/light isn't cooperating so the colors are off. But then nothing seemed to be cooperating with this jacket so I'm not surprised.

Here's the back view.



And this is the lining. The colors are more accurate in this photo but the browns do match in real life.



This is what the jacket looked like last night. At first glance you might not notice what is actually a glaring mistake. Look at the belt bands at the waist. They are not level. By a lot! I didn't notice this until I saw this photo. At that point, I was hoping the jacket was just sitting lopsided on Zillie. It wasn't. Arghhh. I had measured carefully and even used white thread to mark each location. But obviously I messed up somewhere.



This revelation came upon the heels of fighting for over two hours with the place where the lining joins the facing. I was sewing this spot all by machine (as per Jackets for Real People) so the join would be neat. It's actually a pretty good method but since this is my first lined jacket, I had to experiment and learn as I went. But I wasn't learning fast enough for my own satisfaction. LOL! It would've been faster to sew by hand but I'm stubborn (and severely opposed to my own handsewing!).



(The extra seam you see is the princess seam from the front. Next time I'll redraw the facing to space that out more. I think it looks weird and it made it harder to get the lining/facing seams aligned correctly.)

So, back to the waistbands. As you can see, they are sewn into the princess seams and stitched down to the jacket body. The princess seam allowances were also trimmed and edgestitched. And the lining was attached at that point, although not yet at the armholes, thankfully, which saved me even more frustration. I had to rip out the band and one section of an edgestitched princess seam before I could reposition the band. And then I had to fidget with the lining underneath while sewing so I didn't catch it while re-stitching the band back on. Stupid mistake. Repeat after me: Measure twice, sew once. Measure twice, sew once. ;-)

My last frustration yesterday was that the lining kept falling out at the back of the jacket so it could be seen, even though I had anchored it at all the seams. I tried handsewing (yes!) it down but an inch of that told me it wasn't going to be invisible. This fabric does not hide stitches even a little bit. At which point, I threw my hands in the air and ended up anchoring the jacket hem from the inside with a fusible.

Thankfully Belinda was near her computer as I was cursing this jacket and lent me a shoulder to whimper on, gave me a great pep talk and good advice. Of course, if she were actually here instead of virtually so, she would've shown me step-by-step and I wouldn't have made any mistakes. LOL! But with all these "learning experiences" I created for myself, I'm actually feeling a lot more confident for my next lined jacket. In 10 years. ;-)

Now for buttons. This is what I bought. The pickin's at Joann's are slim and this is what I thought were the best of the bunch. The buttons on the left have a slight bronze metallic sheen to them. The buttons on the right are "coconut" and are more speckled. I'm leaning toward the buttons on the left. Opinions?



We're off to the dog park. After that, I'm hoping to start working on a dress pattern, leaving the jacket buttons for tomorrow when I don't hate the jacket so much. ;-)