Finally - a Pattern for the Jacket

Hi all.

First let me apologise for my long absence. My work has been extremely busy in the past couple of weeks due to the explosion in our North West which has cut power supplies to the whole state by 30%. The Department I work for is not an essential service but will be affected by the gas shortage (as will just about every industry – some worse than others). Anyway, I’ve been working my butt off trying to monitor the situation and have been basically exhausted. It’s going to be several months before it’s fixed but at least the work I need to do is set up now so I can take a short breath!

I have managed to make my jacket pattern for the My Pattern comp. I’d like to give a big thank you to all the people out there who so generously share their expertise and I’ll tell you why. I had a plan for this jacket – a pretty solid plan. Then I received a comment from Petro on my WIP review asking if I was planning to use a kimono block with a high underarm and cut on gusset.

Now the only kimono blocks I had seen until then were they ones like in Winnifred Aldrich’s book – literally an easy fitting all-in-one sleeve. This look is not good for me, given I have a very short area between my underarm and my waist – trust me I’ve tried. However, something stuck with me about the comment and one day, I stumbled across Natalie Bray’s book More Dress Pattern Designing. I’d seen the book before but it was quite expensive so I hadn’t bought it. So I opened up the book to a random page and lo and behold – the perfect pattern exactly as Petro had described it. Needless to say I promptly bought the book and have been studying it ever since. So a big thank you to Petro and all the others out there who take the time to share their knowledge.

I started with the block I had already made and converted it to an all in one sleeve with an underarm panel and side seam. I’d love nothing more than to tell you how I did it but about half way in it didn’t look anything like the example so I just ‘made it work’. Here's the first stage of the kimono block - things were going quite well at this point.

The finished back, front and side panels

Front bands, including the right front band that'll have a pleat in it.

The upper collar piece with the pleat set in. And (below that) the upper and under collars.

I’ve cut the toile but haven’t sewn it yet. I feel confident it will either be a perfect fit or a complete disaster – there doesn’t ever seem to be a middle ground with my patterns!

I really hope to get to it this weekend, I get a bit funny when I don’t sew regularly.

Bye for now and I hope it won’t be too long before I next have something to say.