Hi Friends,

For my next White Tree Fabrics project I have decided to make a quilted boho (?) style jacket using some gorgeous Geninne Cloud9 organic cotton. It is the sashiko bird navy colourway and I have already washed, dried and iron this fabric. It is colour fast and wonderfully soft and smooth without being too lightweight either.

Here is my inspiration:

The inspiration jacket features princess seams front and back, welt pockets, a centre front zip fastening and a combination of mirrored and pom pom trim. The inspiration jacket has the lining quilted to the outer fashion fabric, but as I explain below, I have decided not to do that. My jacket is not going to have any fastenings and I have ordered some trim, but I am not sure whether, yet, it will be entirely suitable.

I am using Vogue 7975 as my pattern. I have already made this jacket once before. I took it out of the wardrobe today and tried it on and I am actually astounded at the fact it doesn’t look that bad, given that I made this jacket quite early on in my sewing life. Ok, there are things I wish I had done differently and the size needs slight tweaking, but it wasn’t too bad. If anything at least it has given me a muslin to work from.

In this picture you can see the outer fashion fabric and also the printed cotton I plan on using to line the jacket. The lining fabric, featuring a stag print, was bought locally to me. I don’t know if it is one of the Liberty’s of London rejects that they used to print…

As mentioned above, I am not quilting the lining to the outer fashion fabric. This is because I think the quilting will be too hard to manage, in order to achieve a pucker free finish on both the lining and the outer fabric. Also, I don’t want to hand sew seams or flat fell seams on this project, so I have decided to quilt the outer fashion fabric to the wadding and then line the jacket.

Here’s the details of the wadding I am using:

I have no idea if this is the most appropriate type of wadding to use…I chose it because it is not very lofty and seemed the easiest to work with!

I am working with a total of 3 metres of outer fashion fabric. Today I laid my pattern pieces (still to be adjusted) out roughly on the fashion fabric and decided, to make the quilting process more manageable, to cut the fabric in half and quilt one half at a time. It took me just over 2 hours to put all the diagonal quilting lines on one half, and I made a small start on the diagonal lines that run at 90 degrees to the first set. My quilting lines are approx. 2 inches apart (to create 2 inch squares).

I used my walking foot throughout, and the guide it comes with (the metal bar above) to make sure I was getting lines 2 inches apart.

Here’s what it looks like so far:

So that’s where I am at. This is a project which is going to take a little time. And, to be honest, I don’t know what the outcome is going to be like, or even if I will like it. But that’s part of fun of sewing, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Until soon, have a great weekend.