The Sort-of Felted Wool Jacket

Riding on a tide of euphoria from actually cleaning up my studio, I was true to my word in my last post and polished off a two year old UFO this afternoon.

Voila the Appliqued Sort-of Felted Wool Jacket:

A few years back, an Internet friend sent me some fabric she wasn't ever going to use. And what fabric! Almost six yards of a heavy wool herringbone tweed in one of my favorite colors--eggplant. This was enough wool to play with a bit! So I ran it through several hot washer and dryer cycles just to see what would happen. What happened was that it didn't really felt up, but the fabric became more dense and the herringbone tweed gained more of a brushed and muted texture. Yummy.

What to do with it?

My daughter had brought me a woven wool jacket from Ecuador, the type of thing that costs about $7 on the street in Quito. It was a simple, unlined cardigan jacket and I loved it to pieces. It was just the thing to throw on over a sweater for running around on a winter day. A nice warm extra layer. That jacket was beginning to get just a bit frowsy looking and I decided to try to duplicate it using the herringbone wool.

This is a very simple pattern, boxy and oversized to layer easily over a sweater. It's unlined and bound along the front and sleeve edges. I had some felted wool scraps and thought it would be fun to add an applique motif. I fused down the shapes and scribble-stitched on top of them.

The part of the jacket that caused it to be a UFO for two years was the buttonholes. I have a great electronic sewing machine that has programmable buttonholes in about eight different styles. They ought to be a breeze, but sometimes buttonholes can be problematic no matter what kind of machine you're working with.

I just knew I was going to screw up those buttonholes.

Today I worked up my courage and plunged in, and while they aren't perfect, they will do fine. Victory!

The problem with making buttonholes on a garment like this is that the bias binding on the front edge is thicker than the jacket fabric. You can just predict that the buttonhole foot is going to get hung up. At best you lose the stitch programming, at worst the buttonhole foot might not even clamp the fabric tightly enough to sew straight. Fortunately you can override the stitch programming if you see that things aren't going well.

I was prepared for trouble and was able to override and correct what needed to be corrected. It was a white-knuckle journey but things turned out OK in the end.

One fewer UFO.