My Latest Project

Another thing I've been wanting to do-- show some of my own work.  And today, in the spirit of weekend projects, I'd like to share the last thing I finished.

The fabric was so totally inspiring.  I found it as a very rough scarf on my last thrift store outing.  It was a large enough piece that I know I could make some sort of garment out of it.  It's a Tanzanian cotton, but the motif reminded me so much of traditional Japanese fabrics that I decided this would be my first pass for the season at a kimono style garment.

Now: kimonos need a lot of yardage, and I really didn't have it in this piece.  So I went way, way, way back in the history of clothing and decided to do a very primitive T shaped jacket.  To accomplish this, I folded my fabric in half the long way, and then cut a slit up the fold that ran half the length of the fabric, creating a front opening.  After this, I cut away the corners of fabric to create the T shape.

The corners were then pieced together to form a kimono style collar, which I interfaced to encourage it to lay crisply.  The stitching of the body of the jacket was remarkably simple.  If you do this yourself, you will have to make sure to clip your corners where the body turns to move into the sleeve.  The sleeve will never lay right without this.  I attached my lining through the hem first.  This picture will help you understand why, I think.

I was lucky enough to spend about a year training under a tailor, and I just love the way tailored hems look.  With this garment, hemming first was the easy method to accomplish what I wanted, and it provided the most efficient and durable construction.  I was able to machine stitch all of the finishing on this.

The next step was to baste the center fronts and neckline together with the wrong sides facing each other.  I applied the collar to the inside of the garment first, and the pinned the front side of the collar in face and stitched in the ditch to finish it off.  I also ended up doing a topstitch around the collar, because even with the interfacing, it was not behaving as I wanted.  The cotton was a looser weave and had a mind of its own.  I'm a firm believer in beating such fabrics into submission by whatever means necessary.  Back on track though-- after that, it was a simple matter of pinning up the sleeve hems and topstitching them, with the lining set back a bit from the cotton.  If I were to do this project again, I would probably break down and handstitch the sleeve hems.  The machine stitching gave the hems just a titch more body than I really wanted.

Next time I will try to be patient enough to take pictures of my process!  I do plan to do a few more T shaped garments, and hope to post a tutorial about how to cut one in the next couple months.