The Green Suit is A SUIT!!!!

Well didn't I have a productive weekend!  I suppose it helps that I did some work on the suit during the week, and I had Friday off work. This was because I had a hiccup with my medication and the depression had started to rear its head again.  All is fixed now though (thank goodness!) and I'm firing again on all cylinders!

At the end of my last post, I had the jacket all together, but had forgotten to put the bound buttonhole windows on the facing.  Oops!  The first job was to get them done.  So I put pins through the button holes I had made to mark where the corners should be on the facing.

Then I cut and marked 6 squares of silk organza and pushed them down on the pins.

And then I pinned them down so they were properly flat and I sewed with a tiny stitch length around those little rectangles that you see chalked on the organza.  And this is the reason why you do this first:

 Manipulating this much fabric through the sewing machine is a complete bitch.  But I was patient and I got it all done without any further issues.  I still need to sew these down so they don't move about, but the hard work is done!

Next up were shoulder pads.  I had previously made shoulder pads and the result was a bit meh, so for this suit I thought I would google around and find a tutorial that looked like it produced a better result and I would try their method out.  I found this one, and can I tell you it has changed my life!  I followed it and it made the best shoulder pads I have ever seen!.

First up it has you trace the front and back part of your pattern at the shoulder onto some paper and mark some points on it.  Then you use a protractor (thank goodness I have a school age child in my house so I could borrow his!) to draw arcs, so you end up with something looking like this:

Then you use this pattern to cut out a variety of hair canvas, cotton fabric, and fusible fleece.  I don't have fusible fleece and I didn't want to tempt fate by going to Spotlight (I always come back with more than I intend to) so I just used the cotton batting that I had, and some sheets of finely spun glue.

I ended up with all of this:

I then stacked these pieces up as directed, and sewed the line and ironed them all as shown in the tutorial.  The final step is to pin them around a sleeve roll and give them a good iron/steam and let them cool.

Awesome, awesome tutorial!  I can't recommend it highly enough.  But I wouldn't attempt it without the fusible fleece or the cotton batting and glue like I did, because I'm pretty sure its the glue and all the heat and steam that allows them to hold their shape.

Anyway, on with it!

I sewed them in and put in the lining, which went in brilliantly!  All I had to do was hand sew the bottom of the lining to the facing of the jacket (I almost cut the lining to short when I chopped off the excess!  Shhhh I think I got away with it!!)

And with that the jacket was done! (well, done minus the buttons and a little bit of hand sewing!!)

Then I tackled the skirt.  And by tackled I mean that I easily sewed it all together without a single problem.  I did insert some hair canvas in the waistband to give it some strength, but thats all I did that was unusual.

Voila!!!!!

You will notice that I haven't hemmed the skirt yet (if you look closely).  This is because parts of the skirt are on the bias and I didn't want to go to all the effort of hemming it only to have parts of it drop and have the lining show, or end up with an uneven hem or something.  Because this is a more loosely woven fabric than cotton, I'm pretty sure there will be a shape change.  I could be wrong though...

I'm so proud of this suit, and it really has taught me a few things and increased my confidence with suit making.  I have one more suit to make with modern fabric before I tackle the 'dressmakers box' suit with vintage fabric.

I'm going to Melbourne this coming weekend and will proudly be wearing this suit one of the days.  I'll make sure to have some photos taken so I can show you the finished product next week!

Beccie
xxx