Choir Wardrobe 02 19 12

...and she admits defeat.

I had hoped to wear my new LH Milano jacket today, but last night as I was wrestling with the sleeves I realized it was a wadder, would never be anything but a wadder and the sooner I admitted that to myself and tossed it the less stress would be in my life.

Now, if you've been around Sew Random for any length of time, you know that I absolutely HATE wadders.  I've been known to disassemble, recut, and reassemble a garment to salvage it.   At the very least, I will finish it off and drop it in the Salvation Army donation bag.

But there was no salvaging this fiasco.

It began with fabric choice.  I had ordered stretch poly charmeuse from an on-line vendor, thinking I could use it as a lining.

What I got was a HEAVY stretch satin. Very polyestery at that.  So I decided I'd just us it for trim or for muslins or some such thing.  IOW,  I wasn't crazy about the fabric but just didn't want to hassle with complaining about it.  Early this year, I realized that it IS a color we're wearing a lot for choir (silver gray) so I decided I'd just whip up one of Loes' quick little jackets from it.  No big deal.

I picked the Milano jacket; I'd made it before from poly/lycra moleskin with moderate success, but wanted to see if I could tweak it a bit.

Why I didn't go back and read my notes and look hard at that first jacket I'll never know.

I did a FBA on it, which had the result of making the jacket boxy.  My bad.

I tried to rework the armceyes a bit but was too chicken and didn't go far enough.  I also failed to compare the final sleeve cap seam length to the armsceye seam length.  I had something like 2 inches of extra ease in that sleeve cap.  I thought I'd messed it up, until I pulled out the moleskin jacket and saw the telltale wavers around the sleeve cap; I believe there is just too much ease there to begin with.  After I set in the first sleeve (I first tried pleating in the extra...there is NO easing that heavy satin!) and saw that the armsceye was cutting into the front too much  with something wierd going on in the back, I took it out and whacked away at the armsceye, lowering it and cutting it deeper in the front.  Then I whacked away at the sleeve cap, shortening it and sloping the back more into the cap, as most of the extra ease was in the front.  After I'd chopped enough to get rid of the extra ease, I set it in again and looked at it hard.  It was better, but there was still some weird pleating going on at the back, and the funky little lapel thingy would NOT stay folded flat; the facing kept pulling away.  A button/buttonhole might fix some of that, but I remembered that I'd actually tacked down the lapel on the first jacket to try and get it to stay put...but given the extreme body of this piece, I wasn't sure it would work.

And it was boxy and unflattering.  Not something I would enjoy wearing.

So into the trash bin it went, and I'm trying to decide if the pattern should go with it.  I didn't ding it too badly in the review after the first iteration, so I'm thinking it was just an extreme mismatch of pattern and fabric that made the fiasco.  A natural, spongey, ease-able fabric would no doubt work much better.  But IF I try it again somewhere down the road, you can bet I will give special attention to the armsceye/sleeve cap before I ever put scissors to the fabric (which, I just noticed, I mentioned in the first review.  Yeesh.).

So...where does that leave us?  Wearing old stuff...

February colors are silver, purple and black with jeans, so I ended up wearing my boot-cut Lee jeans, a Cold Water Creek black sweater shell and an ancient silver silk scarf, along with one of my favorite jackets that will fit better once I loose about 10 more pounds...Textile Studios Florence Jacket , which dates from early 2003 and is made from an unbelievably gorgeous textured purple boucle and lined with silk charmeuse. 

Definitely one of my favorite things to wear in the winter time. ;-)