At some point in the past I bought a coupon (between 1.5-2.0) meters of some form of loosely woven plaid stuff. I cannot remember fully why I did this, although I do remember thinking that I should make a jacket out of it. – Brainwave! After filling in the tags for this post, I figured out that I used ‘blue-purple’ once before, for the Double Duty dress, so I guess I bought it for that? – Fast forward a few.. months I think, and I finally pulled it out of the hoard to make a short jacket. The plaid is not balanced and attempting to match would be the death of so I just.. didn’t. I did of course try to mirror the pieces that needed to be cut twice, by choosing the purple line that runs through as the central line.
The pattern I chose was one in Simplicity Naaimode 24 – also known as most of the elements of Simplicity 1325. Very few pieces, unlined and I wanted to test out those bones for the future. I made only one flat pattern change and that was to lengthen the sleeves by 10 cm. I cannot deal with sleeves that are not either full length or short, I need to have control over whether they are halfway up my arms or not. So I cut out the pattern (which took forever) and started sewing. Since the jacket was unlined, I bound some of the seams to make it look somewhat pretty on the insides too, see pictures above.
The instructions were quite helpful this time and I followed them fairly closely. The one other change to the original pattern was that I created a little more of a waist by taking in some of the fabric of the front in the side seams after finishing the remainder of the jacket. When I put it on at the end, I discovered that from the front it looks as though I actually matched the sleeves along the bodice, so happy accidents! Now I only need to convince myself to put it on every now and again.
