The Burda trench jacket – in progress

I am on fire for Fall sewing right now, and the latest object of my desire is my beautiful little trench jacket. I’d bought some waterproof gabardine from Mood when we were in NYC last Fall, but it was the end of the roll so I only had 2.5 yards to play with while selecting a pattern.

With several years of various pattern magazines to choose from, I was in no short supply of trench coat patterns. However, many of the traditional, double-breasted, longer length trench coats require at least 3 yards/metres of fabric, so my fabric shortage helped me narrow down the possibilities immensely. In the end, it was down to Burda 02-2009-119 and Burda 08-2007-111, and I figured I’d get more years of wear from a stylish jacket than I would a cape.

So the curvy, feminine, petite pattern won out!

I did make a muslin of this (I’d be mad not to for a petite pattern), but surprisingly, the only alterations needed were to lengthen the sleeves. Despite being 5’8”, I tend to find that Burda’s Petite patterns fit me waaaay better than Burda’s Tall patterns (which seem to be grotesquely oversized whenever I try them).

MyImage Purple coat – in progress

Yesterday I mentioned that I’ve started sewing the asymmetric, collared coat from the Winter 2011 MyImage magazine, and after a prep period that felt like forever (probably exasperated by the fact that my ironing station is hovering around 0C/30F), I’ve now got some progress to show you!

I’m sewing this up in a wonderful purple basketweave/boucle coating, which was another gift from Claire (she’s so good to me!) at the end of last winter. I always like to underline my coats when I can to just add that little bit of extra warmth, but it made even more sense here as it will help to stabilise the coating fabric and prevent any bagging out that might otherwise occur with looser-weave fabrics. The alternative is to block-fuse the coating with a lightweight interfacing, like I did with my Patrones duffle coat.

For this coat, all the facings were interfaced (the usual front and back facings, plus the front and back hip band facings), and pretty much everything else was underlined in black cotton flannel. This meant there was a lot of prep – everything but like 3 pieces needed underlining or interfacing! I love sewing, but prepping is dull dull dull work!

I machine-basted the flannel underlining to the coat pieces here, because frankly, the prep work was tedious enough as it was. I normally hand baste my underlinings, but in this case, the coating and the flannel “grabbed” each other quite nicely, so this, plus the walking foot, plus a long basting stitch meant it felt okay to do it by machine. I still made sure to never turn any corners though (when basting underlinings, you always stitch to the edge, cut the threads, reposition, and stitch the adjacent side so that you don’t create puckers at the corner)!

The Burda trench jacket

I’m so pleased to finally show you the first piece from my Fall 2011 sewing aspirations – the trench jacket!

As you recall, I was restricted in my pattern choice since I bought the last 2.5 yards of this waterproof gabardine from Mood when we were in NYC last Fall, but in the end I settled on Burda 02-2009-112. The gabardine feels great – it’s not coated with anything and it doesn’t feel plasticky – it’s just that the weave is so tight that water beads on it! Perfect for London!

This is a Burda Petite pattern, but the only change I needed to make to the muslin was to lengthen the sleeves! I’ve been busy sewing this in tiny increments over the past few weeks because I’ve been so busy, and you can see that we had to squeeze in this photoshoot after work, too!

I really love the overall shape of this totally curvy jacket, but I especially love the pleated back vent, which was surprisingly very easy to sew! I cut the same pieces in the lining, and I cleverly waited to sew the diagonal topstitching to keep the folds in place until after the lining was in so the two layers stay together nicely.

The MyImage Purple coat

This coat originally appeared on my Fall 2011 sewing plans, so it feels good to finally finish it just as the weather’s starting to defrost (I hope anyway!). I’ve been wearing my muted turquoise coat for most of the winter, but I’m hoping to wear this to transition into Spring!

I’ve used “coat” in the title, but is it really a coat? Is it a jacket? Where’s the line drawn, anyway? It’s short like a jacket, but wool and warm like a coat, so I’m not quite sure what to call this.

This pattern appeared in the Winter 2011 MyImage magazine (along with that awesome cowl top!) and it’s still available to buy if you fancy it (and holy crap, it’s on sale right now for €1.95/US$2.63, too)!.

You can see some in-progress photos of this coat here and here. The nice thing about working on a project for a while is that you get to see a lot of the “guts” as I work! The downside, of course, is that I have the attention span of a gnat and I get bored when projects stretch over the fortnight mark…

The first thing you notice about this coat is that Big! Collar!! It’s a “whole lotta look”, but I totally dig it. Your mileage may vary! I’ve worn it out twice over the weekend already and the collar is great – it’s substational enough and close enough to the neck that I don’t need a scarf!

When you need thread fast…

I’ve literally been sewing my trench jacket in tiny sessions – 10 minutes before work here, 5 minutes while dinner cooks there – you get the idea. It doesn’t seem like much, but when you add up all the short bursts, it really does mean I’ve made progress in a week where I’ve had social plans every single night, and huge amounts of exhausting boat work every weekend.

But on Saturday night I realised that I’ve come to a bottleneck that couldn’t be fixed with time management – I was nearly out of beige Gutermann thread, and I still had quite a bit of topstitching and a bunch of buttonholes yet to sew. Ordering online would take several crucial days, so I tried to rack my brain for any London shops that stock Gutermann thread and are open Sundays… Hrmmm…

Yes! Of course!

So Sunday morning I got up early and combined my weekend run with a trip to Beyond Fabrics on Columbia Road to restock on No.464 All Purpose thread!

I ended up arriving there a little too early for their 9:00 opening so I ran a few laps around the little triangular park on Quilter Street (yes, Quilter Street!) to fill time before they opened up. Then I just peered in the windows until they laughed and let me in. ha!

I thought for sure the spool would fit in the little elastic space on my arm band where my chapstick usually fits, but it was slightly too big (how dare they not design these things with thread in mind, eh??) so I had to ask for a paper bag to protect the thread from my sweaty fist on the run home.

Upcoming Fall 2011 sewing – the patterns

It’ll be no surprise to you that I’ve already started on my Fall sewing, since you’ve just heard all about my upcoming trench jacket, but I’ve been thinking about the rest of my Fall sewing ambitions over the last few weeks. Having August temperatures mostly in the 50sF (16-20C) meant that I was mentally ready for cooler weather a long time ago!

I’ve got the fabric for all (but two) of these already, too, so I’m sure to get through a lot of my stash this way, too… Though I did just buy some new fabric in order to make four of these, oops. More on the matching fabric later.

Idées Couture magazine May 2011

While we were in Toulouse during our French road trip, not only did the lovely Marie-Christine put us up for the night and cook us a wonderful dinner, but she had a gift for me, too – the latest edition of Idées Couture magazine!

If you’re not familiar with Idées Couture, it’s a monthly magazine that usually has a mix of knitting, crochet, and other crafts, and then one issue per year is a full translation of La Mia Boutique magazine. So even though this issue is the May 2011 Idées Couture, the designs and photos are all from the March 2010 La Mia Boutique magazine. Handily, this was just before my LMB subscription started, so these are all new designs to me!

To complicate matters, last year it was looking as though there was going to be a monthly French LMB translation, titled Ma Boutique, but now it appears that was just a one-off issue and they’re back to doing the yearly Idées Couture magazine instead. Confusing, I know!

The first feature was full of nautical styles that I can never really feel I can wear (for, err, obvious reasons). But I love this short, sailor-style jacket with the contrast topstitching. Clearly I wasn’t the only one, either, as I found out this was the cover image for the equivalent La Mia Boutique issue…