A Tale of Two Jackets…

Last week while I was at Sievers, I did actually have some down time.  I spent the evenings with the students in the studio, and played with some of my own work, so I was available to answer questions and fit issues as they arose, but I wasn’t actually teaching or “on duty”.   I took advantage of the down time, and a trusted group of fiber friends, to embark on a remake of a couple of jackets that have bugged me.

Since each of the garments I make sounds good in theory, and in fact fits and seems to work when I first make it, whether it is in handwoven fabric or something I picked up at Waechter’s Silk Shop in Asheville, the proof is in the actual wearing.  It is quite common for me to tweak a garment, many times actually, until I’m happy with how it feels while I’m wearing it for a whole day.  Handwoven fabric while notorious for having a mind of it’s own, tends to need more tweaking and I had two jackets that I had been eyeing for fixes.

The first you may remember, was a remake from a tencel gown I made for the Convergence Tampa Bay designers challenge back in 2008.  I cut the gown up after it traveled for a couple of years, and made this lovely jacket with a felted collar.  I wore it to the fashion show at the ANWG conference back in April, and there was something about it that really bugged me.  I’m such a perfectionist I know, but when something just doesn’t feel right, you don’t tend to go to it when you want something to wear.

The problem here was the button closures.  I adored the buttons.  They worked well for the piece, but they were large.  Two inches actually.  Which meant the loop that went around them to hold the right front to the left had to be quite large.

So that meant when the jacket was closed, that the fronts moved around a lot.  Meaning I was constantly fussing with it when the jacket was closed.  And this is the kind of jacket that you wear closed.  It isn’t a casual sort of thing.

I got the idea that to make the loops smaller they had to be elastic, to stretch around the gi-normous buttons, but retract so that the two fronts held tight together.  While on a  trek to Walgreens for some drug of some sort, I passed through the hair aisle on the way to the pharmacy and my eye caught on some basic elastic hair ties.  So I picked up a couple of different sizes in black and brought them along on the trip.

First I had to take apart the jacket.  I had re-marked where the ties were suppose to go so I’d have a reference once I pulled out the original button loops, made from a soutache braid.  I pinned the hair ties in place and stitched.

Once I resewed the garment back together, and tried it on, it was like magic.  The fronts gripped together and the hair ties stretched perfectly to go over the gi-normous buttons.

And then there was this jacket.  This one was more complicated.

I made this jacket a few years ago, and loved it when I made it.  It made the rounds of exhibitions, and took a couple of awards, including Complex Weavers.  I had opted not to do a fusible underlining on the jacket because I wanted a more drapey casual kind of look, and I still don’t regret that decision, but the weight of the fabric and the huge amount of construction details on this baby caused considerable drooping over the years, to the point that I actually almost never wore the jacket, and hadn’t in at least two years.  Every time I’d put it on I’d look in the mirror and say, “No”.  It just didn’t work on me.  The buttons were down to the waist and the jacket hem to below my fingertips, and it looked silly.

What to do…

So I gave my class the challenge to redesign something on me, we all talked about it, and it was sweet how everyone had their opinions and tried not to step on anyone else’s toes, especially mine.  Because this is an issue I am really careful about, when working with a student.  What I think isn’t actually important, it is what the student wants and how it feels on them that makes the piece work, my job is to facilitate it.

So I had lots of suggestions, but ultimately the choices were to cut it off at the hem and lose all the detail and asymmetry and the hand dyed coloration that I had carefully chosen for the hem, or cut the whole thing in half, right through the middle.  That was riskier so I had Cindy mark my waist with elastic, and I slept on it.

The next night I had made my decision, and armed with a hefty bottle of wine, I grabbed the rotary cutter and in the words of an old friend who would shout out at intersections, “No guts, no glory…” I cut the entire garment in half.

I tried on the top half, and actually thought it was adorable, though I hadn’t planned on this length and there was no hem allowance and I’d lose all the lovely stuff from the bottom, and decided to keep going.

I basted the two halves back together, eliminating one entire button hole and button, about 4 inches actually, and stood in front of the mirror for an enormous amount of time.  At first I hated it.  It just looked cut off.  The color looked interrupted and there was no shape.  So I added a couple of front waist darts and replaced the belt and I was actually starting to like what I was getting.

I had to wait until I got home and found some of the binding I used to finish it all off, and the rayon boucle I used for the couching, so I could finish everything, and the more I worked on it, the better I liked it.  Now I’m loving it and come fall, I may wear it on a regular basis.  I had thought about reworking the collar, but without the extra length/weight, the collar actually lays better and I added some shoulder pads to define the upper torso.  I don’t have a final photo, but you get the idea.

Sure this was risky.  But truth is, I wasn’t wearing it.  It was just taking up space in my closet and that’s not how these things should be.  It is only cloth, and though it was a huge amount of work to remake this jacket by cutting it through the middle, it was worth it, and a great exercise to really look at something and decide what’s not working about it.  I do this all the time for students, it is easy to stand back and “assess”.  But it is much harder to do on yourself, and I was thrilled to have so many opinions to help guide me towards my final solution.

Stay tuned…