busy and a 1790 jacket

Sorry for not posting in a while again, there are just so much things to do! I have been sewing a lot by hand, watching a ton of Jane Austen movies (wrong era but lovely anyway) . I have finished a chemise, a petticoat and almost a bumroll. I have the binding left on the bumroll but I wont do that until I get some proper stuffing, the polyester stuffing is just there for now. Polyester stuffing seems really off to use even it is is not seen, but after bothering with hand sewing and all I find it a bit of so I am stuffing it with wool in stead.

Silly thing I don’t have pictures on them, but I will take some.

So this month I had to pay the school fee for this semester so there is no way I can afford silk at the moment. So I am making a addition to my 18th century wardrobe, A caraco made out of a red cotton damask my sisters hubby gave me for Christmas, and a matching skirt for it of course, but that might have to wait a bit.

The pattern is made using a diagram from A History of Costume of Carl Kohler and it went together beautifully, when made up it comes out fitting a bust at about 84 cm (33 inches) but that is much to small for me but it was just to enlarge it.

Is this a caraco? I am not sure, I am afraid that I am not entirely sure about what is what in the jacket department yet.

I changed the tail part a bit, it did not turn out as full in the back as pictured on the diagram so I added some pleats to it.



I am not really sure about the look of the tails, they seem a bit off, a bit to long or a bit to short, in a weird middle. I an not entirely convinced I want the pleats either, I might change it and make more of a full skirt kind of appearance and no pleats.

 

mini photo shoot

I had a mini photo shoot all by myself on my balcony this Saturday, and as a girl who want to everything herself I played both model and photographer ;P A bit of fabric in one end of the balcony and the camera on timer in the other was all that was needed to make it work, and I do not have a big balcony at all :P I use a Canon PowerShot A640 and it have custom timer settings, so I have the setting on it waiting 1 second and then taking 10 frames at a row with 1 second in between.

 

the jacket is finished

I was certain that I did blog about it but well, it is obvious that I have not done so. ;)

The striped wool fabric for this jacket is woven by me, and it was heartbreaking cutting out the pieces, knowing that if I mess up, there is no way that I can just go and buy some more fabric and putting up a warp is really time consuming so that is really not an option either.
A tricky fabric since the edges frayed A LOT. The black wool is store bought.

the patterns is done by me as usual and the jacket features, hand sewn buttonholes, bright red satin lining, pockets with the same lining as the jacket it self, a lot of love and pattern matching. But a lot of the matching are actually accidental, I made sure that the striped in the waist would match and then the most of the other stripes said “OK we will cooperate!”.

the pother posts about the jacket can be found
here
here
here
here

 

the silver lining

kind of…

I have only to sew the bottom of the lining to the jacket left, that and to do the same in the sleeves and to sew in two buttons :) Almost done, that makes me happy :D

 

pockets

Today as usual at Tuesdays we were “thrown out” from our classroom, the gymnasium students are having “free choise” lessons and one can chose to have sewing then, and they need our machines and rooms. So there is not a whole lot of sewing on Tuesdays, but I actually feel that I made something for a change. I made pockets (one is finished and one is half finished)

 

the jacket (again)

Now I can make pretend that it is finished, but there are still some stuff to do on it. It needs hand sewn buttonholes, pockets and it needs to have the lining attached. But I expect it to be done at the end of next week. On the picture I have pinned a paper pocket shape on the jacket, and the buttons are also only pinned on.

 

the striped jacket

In school I am currently working on a jacket, I actually weaved this fabric myself, it is wool weft with cotton warp. I actually don’t know any weaving terms in English, but Ill make it up as I go along ;)
The warp is solid black cotton, to get the sharpest colors I decided to not have the warp in stripes, that made me weave the fabric the “wrong” way stripes laying down in stead of the normal way.

This is the sketch I made for this jacket.