Reversible jacket

Eventually I had something I was more or less happy with, and had it printed on huge sheets of architectural paper at Staples. I also went to the fabric store and chose some colours I liked - the pattern requires six colours across the inside and outside sections. I chose seven so that I could have some options.

I went with cotton, which is a weird choice probably for a jacket. The lady at the fabric store was very amused to see 80s styles coming back.

Cutting out the pattern

This took so very much longer than I thought, good gracious. I learned that the arrow on the pattern pieces should be parallel to the selvedge edge. I .. think I did that. I hope I did. I think it impacts how the fabric stretches. Some of the cuts/colours needed to be folded crosswise and some lengthwise.

Starting to sew

Starting to sew pieces together. I was very nervous about everything fitting together, and also things like whether seam allowance was included in the pattern pieces or whether I needed to add it outside of the pattern pieces. I ended up not adding it, and this was the right call - seam allowance was already incorporated into the pattern pieces.

Also here it looks as if I was going to perhaps alternate the back panels, but I decided against this and did half one colour, half the other.

I decided to use a contrast thread throughout, green to match my contrast colour pieces.

Here you can see the outer back assembled, along with the bag band (green). The thinner bag strap (also green) is sandwitched between the band and jacket. This is the only seam in the whole jacket that I ended up being really unhappy with and wishing I could redo - N.B. that when you are attaching the bag band, this seam is going to end up showing on the back of the inner garment. I pinned and sewed it carefully but it still ended up looking really not very clean at all on the back, which was disappointing. I do not have the skill to tell you how to make this end up looking straight on both sides (the problem is it's adjacent to other seams which will actually be quite straight, so it looks very clearly not straight in comparison). If I had to redo this I think I would just choose a bobbin thread that matched the colour of the fabric on the inner garmnet back piece so it was less obvious, instead of my contrast thread.

Pockets!

Lower pockets

Assembling the lower pockets. Important note - it was tricky to read in the scanned pattern, but there are actually two differently sized 'L' pieces. I had initially thought that both were needed to form the inner and outer parts of the lower pockets, but in trying to piece them together, concluded that couldn't be it. It appears that there are two different L pieces, one corresponding to sizes S-M-L and the other to sizes XL-XXL-XXXL - choose only the version for the size you're making, and you won't use the other. All 8 pieces of varying colours will be cut from the same L pattern piece.

Also be careful you're lining these up to the proper side of F such that the strip that peeks through from the back (here, green) is on different sides on each of the two paired pockets for inside, and for outside. You can see in the two completed black / blue pockets here that they're mirrored.

Upper pockets

Piecing together the upper pockets was more fun than I thought. I cut out a bunch of strips of varied colours and widths and laid them out until I was more or less happy with them. One pocket was to go on a black section, and one on a pink, so I inverted the colours of the base pockets to match. I did not cut out anything for the upper pockets until this point, since I wanted to see how the colours from the rest of the jacket balanced and decide once I got here what to do.

I really messed up here unfortunately - I had such a nice clean edge seam to affix the pockets to pattern piece E, but when I moved on to the next step (connecting E to D and to the lower pockets made in the previous step), I realized I must have messed up because the connecting edges were all different lengths. It was here that I discovered that I had sewn the pockets on sideways. You can actually see my clearly marked little '+' signs that mark out where the top of the pocket should sit in the photo on the right here ... woops. I ripped out my seams and got them attached on alright. This is probably very obvious to experienced pattern makers, but I'd recommend laying out these pieces to make sure you've got everything oriented correctly prior to sewing anything together.

The final stretch

Attaching the arms, banding, binding, and bringing everything together. I neglected to take pictures for assembling the arms in this step, but important note - when sewing the arms together, I had to really cut down the length of the cuffs (pattern piece I) before attaching them. This is probably just due to the fact that the third pattern page was scaled differently to the other two and I messed up the scaling slightly, but they were really quite long and would not have worked had I not cut them down to match the width of the arms.

It's really starting to look like a jacket now! Here the front is all assembled and basted. I've got the little belt holders attached, too. There is so much fabric at this point, and it's rather heavy. I can't recommend enough basting it to hold all of these layers together while you're working on it.

Attaching the front band (M). The bands were very pleasing to sew because they were nice straight seams.

The completed jacket

I didn't take very many pictures in the final stretch, probably because of how many treacherous curved seams there were. Attaching the arms to the body of the jacket took a very long time, not just in execution, but in understanding what the heck the instructions were trying to tell me about which layers I was sewing together. Here is where I was really questioning my decision to make this garment that had so many layers and faces, but I worked it out eventually. If you're reading this and are trying to figure out how to pin this seam, you want to have both the body of the jacket and the arm you're trying to attach in 'outer garment' mode - i.e. what it would look like if you were wearing the outer garment - and you are pinning the right side of the inner garment body to the right side of the inner garment arm. The pins and seam you're sewing from the outside. This may be just as clear as mud as I found the pattern instructions to be but I hope it helps somebody.

The opening of the arms ended up being slightly - perhaps 3/4" - too large for the body arm hole. Maybe this is normal and I should have kind of cut some of the body's arm hole a bit larger to accomodate or something, but I was worried that would mess with the final fit. I really didn't want to be lazy and introduce some sort of pleat into the arm somewhere, so what I ended up doing was pulling from my pirate shirt experience and doing a very slight gather all the way around the arm. I ran two parallel running stitches all around the outside of the arm opening on the sleeve, then pulled the threads to gather the material and pull it in to match the size of the body arm hole. I evenly distributed the gather so that I didn't end up with an actual fold in the fabric anywhere. This took forever but I am very glad I did it and I'm really happy with the final arm attachment, which is fold-free and fits nicely! I did have to do this for both arms. This could be another thing relating to the scaling of the pattern pieces, but it could also just be me being a bit imprecise with some of the cuts and seams.

And here is the finished jacket! This was a very fun thing to make, I learned a ton. I would love to try some more patterns, particularly ones where I get to hide a lot more of the final seams.