Project: Vogue 9820 (1959) Jacket, Part 5

Readers,

I finished my wearable test this morning, and am pretty pleased with the result.

When I saw how well this was coming together I realized this could be a garment I’d really wear. So I lavished more attention on it than I would a usual test. I went ahead and interfaced it, put in sleeveheads, made and installed shoulder pads–the works.

The good news is that I gained a garment for my trouble, and got valuable experience that should make my “real” jacket–the one with the leopard-print velveteen collar–easier to sew and better looking than it would have otherwise.

Just this morning I noticed that my hat looks a lot like the hat in the pattern illustration.

The bad news is, in my imagination I was going to have this finished on Tuesday–four days ago–and the leopard one finished yesterday. Uh huh.

So for all the success I should be enjoying, I feel late. Behind “schedule.”

I just might skip the vent in the next jacket I sew. Then I could install the lining almost entirely by machine.

Oh, I’ll get over this; by tomorrow I’ll be all jazzed up to start the leopard collar jacket and will have forgotten this ridiculous “late” business.

Here’s the strangest part: I feel more late having finished this jacket today rather than this past Tuesday than I feel late about having had the fabric and the plan to sew this jacket since 2002!

I used a milk-chocolate brown lining from my stash.

Surely somebody has studied this phenomenon of disproportionate and misplaced something-or-other. If not, there’s PhD research material here, and I volunteer to be a subject. If there’s a cure, clue me in.

My “lateness” was for the best of reasons. I saw that taking more time to do the job as right as I could–like installing sleeveheads to smooth out the wrinkles in the sleeve caps, mitering the vent to reduce bulk, stabilizing seams, etc., would be good practice for all my future projects and would yield better looking, longer lasting results.

Oh, and the doing often wasn’t as time-consuming as figuring out what to do and in what sequence, because I don’t always follow the instructions in vintage patterns, which can be either vague or unnecessarily labor-intensive.

But I did figure out what to do. And I did figure out the sequence. This turned out to be a straightforward project with nothing very tricky.

This is such a smart looking jacket, easy to sew, easy to love, vintage enough for vintage lovers but contemporary too.

Vogue Patterns, a new audience awaits the reissuing of this pattern!