o hello 🙂
I’ve made a suede cardigan for myself, or is it a jacket? The pattern says “jacket” but I tend to think of jackets as being kinda involved, time-consuming things to make, with lining and so forth. While cardigans are unstructured, unlined things one can whizz up in a blink of an eye. Which actually describes this thing pretty well.
The pattern is jacket 132 from Burda style magazine 11/2012, which Philippa sent to me in a giveaway, thank you so much Philippa! I lurve Burda magazines, the designs are usually both interesting and stylish, the cost per pattern is very very low, and still not bad even if you do only make a few things in an issue. I reckon they deserve to be a heckuvva lot more popular than they are. You don’t need every issue but I generally get maybe one magazine in a year and manage to make several things in each one. This design caught my eye straight away, and was firmly in my mind when I bought my leather. I actually made a muslin for it, which is only worth mentioning because it’s such a rare thing for me to do. Well my leather was kinda precious and I did not want to stuff it up! I did a minor sway back adjustment and shortened the bust darts by a few inches.
I used my two pieces of caramel brown pigskin, bought in Copenhagen on our trip. I liked both sides; the smoother, leather-y side has some interesting brand marks, but the suede side has the most glorious, rich caramel colour. Colour trumped brand marks.
The cardigan is quite long in the body with wide-ish front flaps so it took some layout wizardry to get the pattern pieces out! I re-laid the pieces down over and over and over again, trying to fit them all in and cut it with the skinniest little 5mm seam allowances. I did have to do just one little fill-in piecing on the left back back, but I managed to position this at the very top, centre back, so it’s as un-noticeable as I think it could possibly be!
The pattern has pockets; which I cut to be nice and huge, to accommodate my nice huge hands, hehe. Burda magazine patterns have the teeniest tiniest child-sized pockets of all, I swear. Very cute, but seriously?! Maybe it’s just me; I like to plunge my hands right down deep into my pockets 🙂 I used chocolate brown silk charmeuse, which I fortuitously just happened to have in my stash already, hanging around, in the perfect colour, you know, as you do 😉 Hopefully cutting those pockets out of it won’t mean I now don’t have enough for it to fulfil its original destiny.
The pattern called for a waist tie, to be sewn in the side seams. I preferred the idea of a separate belt that I could wear or not wear, whichever I wanted, however whim and whimsy struck, and not to have the ties dangling uselessly and annoyingly at my sides whenever I was wearing the cardigan loose. So I put little belt loops in the side seams, seen at top left in the picture above, and made a very long skinny belt as a separate thing. This has tonnes of mad bias-cut piecing all along it, as I was dealing with mere scraps of leather by the time I had cut out the main pieces of the jacket. But I don’t think that matters much, you can barely see all the joins when it’s on. This is simply folded in two lengthwise and topstitched.
I think worn loose, as at top, it looks quite modern, and with the waist tied up it looks a little bit boho 70’s, yes?
I am very happy with, and am very much going to enjoy wearing my Copenhagen souvenir!
Later edit: some technical details on sewing with leather, and thank you so much to Erica for asking 🙂
This is the first leather thing I have made so I learned a few things… I used a denim needle and regular polyester all-purpose thread, and used paper clips to hold edges together in lieu of pins. Lots of experimenting to get the tension right, I ended up with a medium-loose tension and a long stitch. The leather didn’t move through my machine very easily, so I used strips of tissue paper while stitching the seams, which helped a lot. Fortunately, this jacket had few seams! I used tissue paper both top and bottom, and did this by folding a wide, single strip and wrapping it closely around the edges before clipping it all together with paper clips, then sewed the seam; which was easier to hold in place than I imagine two separate strips would be, and also made it easier to follow an even seam allowance while stitching too.
For short seams, like piecing the belt pieces together; I started stitching from halfway along and ended at the edge, then turned the piece over and stitched the other half of the seam from the same halfway point to the other edge, because my machine didn’t like “starting” on an edge, and behaved badly on these. If I was to do more sewing with leather I think it would probably be very well worth getting a teflon foot for my machine, which will enable the leather to glide through more smoothly.
Details:
Cardigan; Burdastyle magazine 11/2012-132, caramel pigskin suede
Jeans, Burda 7863, white denim, details here and my review of this pattern here
Tshirt; self-drafted, white cotton jersey, details here
Socks; hand-knitted by me, details here
Shoes; Francesco Morichetti, from Zomp shoes
