The Fall Jacket -- Finished At Last!

Yay! It's Done!

I'm so happy with this finished jacket and so pleased that it turned out so well.

I've only ever used a couple of Butterick patterns and I've been pretty happy with them --  it could be that the other Buttericks I've sewn have been loose-fitting and the normal issues I have with patterns just haven't come up.   Or it could be that for whatever reason their draft fits me right out of the envelope.  I ordinarily have to spend quite some time narrowing the shoulders and doing small bust adjustments.  Not so with the Fall Jacket.

Butterick 5685 and wool blend fabric

The pattern is Butterick 5685 and is designed for lightweight woolens, tweeds, or poplins.  I used a very nice 30% wool woven that I picked up at JoAnn's (an amazing find since my JoAnn's almost never has wool or silk) with leaves embroidered in rayon.  It sewed up beautifully -- a real joy to work with.  My only regret is that I have just a yard or so left.  On the other hand, the fabric is so distinctive it may not be a good idea to have too many articles of clothing made from it.  Hmmm. I think there's enough left for a vest, though...

First muslin -- this project
only needed one

The muslin, sewed right from the tracing, fit beautifully right from the get-go.  The only thing I tweaked was I trimmed 1/2 inch from each front to narrow it up a bit.  It pulled in the princess seams just enough so that their placement was more to my liking without really disrupting anything else in the jacket.  The sleeves are very nice with an excellent amount of sleeve cap ease -- enough for good fit but not too much to make assembly a nightmare. 

poly spruce -- I like the green and brown combo

The lining is a sort of spruce-colored polyester.  I bought half a dozen yards or so of this last year for making linings and I really wish I'd bought more.  Actually, I think I bought what was left on the bolt, so maybe I mean I wish there had be more for me to buy  :-)

Anyway, it makes a fabulous lining, with just the right amount of slipperiness for sliding over sweaters.  In fact, I was a little concerned that I made the jacket too small at first -- trying on just the shell dragged so much against the t-shirt I was wearing that it made the jacket feel very snug.  Horror!  Doom! Despair!

Then I slipped on the lining, and then the shell (the two hadn't been joined yet) and I couldn't believe how much roomier the jacket felt.  Behold the Power of a Polyester Lining!

I used woven fusible interfacing for the fronts and plain muslin as interfacing for the collar.  I trimmed the seam allowances of the interfacing before fusing to reduce bulk.  This really helped to make the corners nice and sharp when turned.




The shoulder pads are 1/4 inch instead of 1/2 inch like the pattern calls for and I certainly did NOT extend the outer edge 5/8 inch past the shoulder seam.  That's the aforementioned dreaded linebacker shoulders and I am so not going there. I bought these at JoAnn's yesterday since I decided I was too lazy to dig out the appropriate supplies to make my own.

So, I have mostly good things to say about this pattern's draft.  I should mention, however, that it is important to sew all the seams from the top down, as l discovered that the pieces did not all quite properly match at the hem.  The fronts in particular were shorter than the sides and back, so I ended up trimming a bit to even everything up.  I'd suspect sewing error except that the same difference occurred when sewing both the lining and the shell.

As for the instructions.  They're terrible.  At least in my opinion.  I read through them several times, at first to get a feel for the construction, and then to try and figure out why the heck they would put this jacket together the way they did.  I got the first, but I'm still baffled by the second.

The instructions have you sew the upper half shell and lining together, then sew the lower half shell and lining together, and then join the two at the waist seam (sewing the shell seam and slip stitching by hand the lining seam...ummm...sewing by hand, Butterick?  I think not).  After that, you get to fumble around a bit trying to put the sleeves and shoulder pads in while trying to keep the lining out of the way because hey! the lining sleeves are SLIP STITCHED IN BY HAND!!!  Need I say more?

What I did was first assemble the shell (all of it, including the sleeves), then assemble the lining (also including the sleeves), and then join the two along the front and neckline seam.  So simple.  So easy.  I can't for the life of me figure out why Butterick made it so damn complicated.

I stitched the cuffs differently as well, and I sure do wish I had done the buttonholes differently, because I really don't like them as they are.  It might not be too late to fix it, but I'm not going to do it right now.

The cuffs call for turning up the shell fabric over the lining and stitching the hem.  I pulled both the shell and the lining fabrics inside out between the shell and lining layers, placed them right sides together and sewed them together at 3/4 inch seam allowance.

Trimming the lining would have kept it
more firmly inside the sleeve

I should have trimmed the lining about 1/2 inch as this would have guaranteed that the lining would stay inside the sleeve when the jacket was slipped on, but this is a minor issue and one I'm not going to worry about.









The buttonholes are placed on the edges of the jacket both on the inside front layer and the outside front layer.  This means that the inside layer gets buttoned awkwardly and I don't like it.  It also means there's buttons on top of each other on that side -- the inside functional ones and the outside decorative ones (I couldn't figure out at first why the pattern called for 6 buttons...).  I will likely sew shut the buttonholes on that inside layer and put buttons there while putting two button holes near the princess seam on the outside layer so it's not so clumsy to button the jacket closed.

Now for the oddities.  I call them oddities because  I refuse to call them mistakes :o)

Not sure how this happened
but I intend to find out

The collar.  Note that mine doesn't extend all the way to the edges of the fronts like in the drawing on the pattern envelope.  There is exactly a 1 5/8 inch extension beyond the collar.  On both sides.  Except that when I walk the seam lines on the pattern paper, the seam lines match edge to edge.  And I staystitched the neckline of both the shell and the lining.  I'm going to sew this baby again just to see if I can duplicate the phenomenon.  I really want to know what happened there.

In any event, I actually like it better this way.  Somehow, I think it suits me more.  What I don't like is the button placement.  Because I used the pattern guide for buttonhole placement which plans on that corner being turned down a bit, the buttonholes are too far away from the edge and the top.  I sewed a small snap to the corner there to keep it from flopping around -- not the ideal solution but one that is good enough.

A good way NOT to do a hem

The other "oddity" is the hem.  You can't see this oddity, but I know it's there.  It will bother me for a while, but I am determined to ignore it :o)  I wanted a nicely finished hem, so I folded polyester organza ribbon over the edge and stitched it down like seam binding.  Bad idea.  Bad, bad, bad idea.  It would have worked if the hem had been straight.  But it wasn't.  When I folded up the hem along it's slight curve, the ribbon bunched up and rippled and generally made a nuisance of itself.  And it's too stiff.  I highly recommend against using poly organza ribbon as a seam binding.  I know I won't do that again.

Even with it's quirks, I absolutely love this jacket.  I tested it out last night for 15 minutes at 30F degrees -- it's a little too light for that temperature but should be perfect for 40F - 50F.  New England daytime Fall temperatures.  Exactly what I had in mind. 

I think this jacket is a great draft.  It fit beautifully all over and the sleeves didn't not have enormous amounts of sleeve cap ease.  While I don't need more than one jacket with a collar like this, I think I will use this pattern again after I find another collar for it -- it makes a really nice double breasted jacket.