Travel jacket – another Marcy Tilton design
I have trouble resisting Marcy’s designs. So I had to have V9244, and was super pleased to find this fabric to make it. It came from Barry’s. It’s a relatively warm knit, and will pack and crush well when I go and visit some of the places depicted!
Just in case the fabric design got lost in the making, a took a few photos of the travel scenes.
The scenes face in all directions, so nap and pattern matching are irrelevant.
It’s quite hard to know where to start with this one. So I’ll start by saying that it eventually makes up OK, and that the weight of knitted fabric selected was ideal. I used a mixture of the overlocker and sewing machine with the walking foot.
I think there are a few mistakes with this pattern, which is quite rare for Vogue. The major mistake is that the pattern pieces for the pockets are not graded and I think that they should be. If you cut one-size-fits-all, the pieces don’t fit the size 16 that I made up. I re-drafted the pockets pieces based on the side front dimensions. Also, I bought far too much fabric and binding, based on the pattern recommendations. Fabric + contrast total 3.1m, which is what I bought, but I only used about 1.5m of it. I decided that making binding out of the fabric would not only be fiddly, but that the multi-coloured binding would get lost in the jacket. I know that minervacrafts.com do some stretch cotton binding, so I ordered 6m of brown, which is very slightly more than the length of the binding in the pattern pieces. That was far too much as well, even though I didn’t bind the centre seam of the hood. The brown creates a visible contrast.
There were many minutes if cautious sewing to put the binding in place.
You can play a game of ‘spot the difference’ with views A and B. I couldn’t see any differences until the instructions suggested an extra line of stitching at the hem for View A. I think that two lines of stitching work best. The only other difference that I could find was in the size of the buttons, but the positioning is pretty much the same and the pieces for button placement are very similar. I think I did View B buttons.
I omitted the back tab. It is likely that most of the time that I wear this jacket, I will be carrying a small rucksack, and I think that the tab would not only be covered up, but could get in the way.
So, a few notes about making up the jacket, other than the key one about re-drafting the pocket pieces if you are making up any size greater than 14.
- Take care when stitching the neck binding in place. I thought I had carefully placed it centrally over the neck seam (which I stitched on the sewing machine; not the overlocker), but the most curved part, on the front neck, travels north. I decided it would be messy to unpick, and I generally covered by the hood, so I left it….
- I did a lot of hanging, pressing and pinning before stitching the front hem. As the hem conceals the bottoms of the pockets, they have to be hanging correctly, and you, of course need to make sure that the centre fronts are matched and the correct length.
Will I make another? I think that there is a very good chance that I will. It’s going to be very comfortable to wear, but I may be limited in what I can wear with it because of the multitude of colours. I suspect that I will chose to make a plain coloured one which will match more of my wardrobe.
One Week, One Pattern
Me Made May 2016
Me Made May 2015
Simplicity Competition
Sew Over it Patterns
all my own work by ann 