City stripes

I love the fact that I am at a place in my sewing that I can have an idea and be able to draft patterns to what I want.  This doesn’t always mean the execution is easy, though!  This jacket was a huge pain the butt, and took most of a day, but I love it.

I was going for cool jacket vibe here.

These were most of the pieces (just missing the pockets):

The fabrics I used here were:

Fabric Anthropology – Red City Stripes (currently on Pre-Order until November 15).

Nature’s Fabrics – Black Bamboo Stretch Fleece 300gsm

Nature’s Fabrics – Dark Shadow Bamboo Stretch Fleece 300gsm

All these fabrics were fantastic to work with.  I received the FA sample for free, but purchased the sweatshirt fleece fabrics.  I used brushed poly for the FA fabric, but I think their French terry would have worked great, too.  I think having BP in the back panel that gets cinched in worked very nicely since it has more drape to it.  The FA brushed poly is nice and thick, so it worked well to mix it with sweatshirt fleece.

This how you know what the heck you are doing with sewing.  Sewing these points in fabric has gotten much easier now that I figured out how to do it.

The back has a faux leather with some eyelets I put in it them.  The eyelet setter has some crappy reviews, but it was easy to figure out and use.  Not sure why someone would need instructions.  I used black elastic in the cinching so it would be comfy to wear.

I widened out the back in order to have a nice body to it when cinching it up.  The top yoke helped to keep the extra width corralled.

The hood and the front middle sections are fully lined and enclosed.  It looks pretty good on the inside.  The hood has five pieces to it.  My biggest angst was figuring out how the heck I had to put on the hood.  Oh, and the fact that I ran out of Wondertape in putting in the zipper.

All in all, I absolutely love how this turned out!  Check out the links for the fabrics if you like them.  It is so hard to find good sweatshirt fleece, and this fleece feels fantastic.  I also just love the FA brushed poly.

My next sewing projects are going to include a few more watercolors from FA when I get them in the mail (girl is getting more fun stuff), and I also need to make a black and white choir outfit for her, too.  I’ve got a great idea for it, and I think she will look very pretty in it.  More drafting ahead!