My Rowing Jacket!

I forgot all about blogging about this jacket last week when I finished it on Tuesday night, even though I did a review on PR about it.

This is the Jalie 2679 sport jacket without a hood. I made an earlier version last fall in Disco Pink, but because I was so concerned about the lack of stretch in my fabric, it turned out to be far too wide in the body to use for rowing. It’s a great cycling jacket though, and I’ve worn it a lot.

For my rowing version, I ended up re-printing the whole pattern in the AA size, which is what I started with last time. But instead of doing a whole bunch of pattern mods like last time, (FBA, swayback, full booty, broad shoulder) I just did the broad-shoulder raglan sleeve adjustment. I figure there’s no way I’m going to get a raglan sleeve to fit me properly out of the envelope. It’s just part of my life now. Last time I also reduced the seam allowances to about 0.6mm instead of 1cm, and that made quite a bit of difference in the sizing as well. This time I was very vigilant, when I sewed the piping on, to make sure the edge of the fabric was still going along the 1cm mark on my sewing machine.

In case you are wondering, I used a zipper foot to sew the piping on, with my needle position adjusted slightly to the left (towards the piping) to try and get the stitching snug up against that piping. Then I sewed on the other layer with the zipper foot again, but with the piping facing down so that I could follow the original stitching line. Then I switched over to my other machine which was loaded with topstitching thread and an edgestitch foot, so I could get that topstitching really close in to the piping. The resulting seams looked really great. Oh, I also used a piece of file folder/cardboard under my presser foot as I went along (you should check out this tutorial vid from Discovery Fabrics to see what that’s all about).

Here’s the finished jacket… It’s absolutely AWESOME.