Hello again! Did you miss me?

Like I mentioned in the previous post I have accumulated 4 sewing projects in the last few months and am ready to post all of them.

This project is actually the second time using the McCall’s M7058 princess seam outerwear packet. First time around I used it for an Easter art piece, ‘High Expectations Meet Unexpected Realities’ and you should check it out if you’re curious.

That project was a clever attempt to practice with this particular pattern because I have plans to make multiple garments from it. Here is the first garment I made from this, a collarless blazer using vintage pieces of fabric gifted to me a while ago.

Believe it or not, I have yet to make a jacket for myself. I’ve only made a zippered hoodie jacket for a friend of mine, but I haven’t made any form of outerwear since then. This oversight needed to be rectified and fast, lol.

I like this pattern pack a lot because it’s a classic princess design modified into different varieties I could see myself making in the near future. Blazer A only needs 2 yards of fabric to make and that appeals to my budget too.

So I was given a bunch of fabrics from a nice lady that she had for many years (always happy to give fabrics a new home, lol). I found 2 pieces of plaid wool-like fabric in 2 different colors that were about a yard each. On their own, I wouldn’t be able to make anything significant to wear outside of a miniskirt but I COULD use them together and make the blazer from this pattern instead.

However, I remembered having trouble in my art piece project attaching the lining to the coat with the back slits giving me the hardest time. Plus, I forgo interfacing since fusible would not work for this project AND my buttonhole stitching also needed work. Fortunately it was just an art piece but I really wanted to figure it out so the garments I make from this pattern are wearable. Looking into my copy of the book ‘Couture Sewing Techniques’, I learned a technique where you just sew the jacket body together, sans shoulders & sleeves, and then hand sew the lining in flat along the jacket. I also learned about pad-stitching cotton fabric as interfacing for jackets who can’t handle fusible interfacing and bound buttonholes for a more durable and clean finish as opposed to stitching them on the machine. All these techniques seem more favorable for what I’m working with.

So now that I found an alternative for constructing this blazer, I decided to deviate away from some of McCall’s instructions for this blazer and incorporate the haute couture techniques I read about instead. I practiced all these things on a muslin toile first while adjusting the pattern size for fit. Once I figured it all out, I jumped right into making the blazer for real. For this particular project, I took my time and went about it slower than I usually do with my sewing. The hand sewing is not as quick as machine stitching, but I had more control and could backtrack when mistakes were made or get into tight spots where my machine can’t.

Readers, I LOVE how this blazer worked out. Mixing the 2 plaids was definitely a sartorial risk but I lucked out having yellow appear in both fabrics so they complimented each other while standing out at the same time.

Thanks to my painstaking work on the muslin toile, I made the jacket to fit a sleeveless top underneath to compensate for the wool-like fabric. I also learned to shorten the shoulder width and add pennies to the hem as weights so that the blazer hangs properly while wearing it.

Sometime later I’ll post BTS pics of making this blazer but for now, enjoy the fruits of my labor. 🙂