For my dressmaker exam, I had to make a children’s jacket. As I don’t have any children myself, I opted to make one for my 7-year-old niece.
Because it was an exam piece, the jacket had to adhere to certain criteria:
- Lined
- With a closure
- With pockets
- With either a collar or a hood
My niece, however, had a completely different set of criteria:
- Fluffy rainbow fabric
- A hood with ears
- A tail
- No buttons
Well, those didn’t appear to be incompatible, so I went ahead!
The fabric proved to be quite a challenge. It started, of course, with cutting all that hairy junk. Luckily, it wasn’t the first time I’d worked with this kind of fabric, so I knew what needed to be done: immediately serge all the edges after cutting, and vacuum my workspace and myself thoroughly before setting foot outside the room! Initially it will still look as if a unicorn exploded in your workspace, but at least it’s just a one-time thing instead of every time you continue with your sewing project.
For the lining, I chose a light pink teddy fabric. Super soft! But… my basting threads disappeared under the fluff, and I now understand why you need different colors of basting thread, because that beige completely disappeared among the light pink!
Even among all the rainbow hairs of the outer fabric, the basting threads were no longer noticeable, but worse still: due to the fairly open weave of the fabric, they fell out very quickly, so I still had no reference point for where the fabrics needed to be stitched together! And because of the enormous stretch in the fabric, cutting had also been difficult, so the edge of the fabric hadn’t exactly turned out even and therefore couldn’t serve as a guideline either.
On the other hand: with this kind of fabric, you can get away with being off by a good centimeter, because it stretches so much that the thing will fit no matter what. 😄 Plus, all the stitches and oopsies disappear under all that hairy fluff, so no one will notice if it isn’t even everywhere.
The thing turned out to be so stretchy that I even got it to fit on my adult sized mannequin:
There are some aspects I’m not satisfied with – the hood should have been deeper and the pockets bigger. But my niece was super happy with it!
Time spent: I didn’t keep track, but it practically swallowed up my entire autumn break.
Cost: €44,33 (furry and teddy fabric plus a zipper)
Related Posts
