Suits you Sir!

Suits You, Sir...

Or, An Adventure in FTL Tailoring

This project grew out of adversity.  Firstly, we had news last year that a friend had liver cancer, so sorrow and grief were inevitable.  There was little we could do for her and her family other than hope and pray...  But I knew there would soon be an occasion for Alan to dig out his suit.

Before Christmas I had a tailoring student from the London School of Fashion working with me.  In order to show her something, I dug both of Alan's suits out of the wardrobe, the one I had made some years ago, and the one he had made by Burtons for our wedding, now nearly 27 years ago...

Alas!  And Alack!  The moths had done their worst and feasted on the worsted!   I was going to need to make a new suit rather sooner than I had hoped!  Never mind, there would be time in the New Year to get that project started...

Um...  No...  Sadly, our friend lost her battle just after New Year, and we had two weeks notice for the funeral.  I knew I had MOST of what I needed in the way of fabrics, but a quick try-on of the extant suit confirmed that Himself has added rather too many inches to his waistline this past year for me just to dig out the old Vogue pattern and remake that...  A goodly chunk of what follows was first aired on LJ, in Dress Diaries.

I thought I'd have time to play with my new Wild Ginger Tailor Made and work out a suit of suitable style...  No such luck!  Oddly, for something called Tailor Made, there is no option for a traditionally tailored jacket, and to work out how to do this suddenly ceased to be an option when the timescale was so drastically contracted.  I had only until January 21 to get this done - barely a fortnight!!  It  needed to be packed and on the road the day before...  And my darling man spends part of each week working 200 miles away, so opportunities for fittings were...  um...  limited!

So, no pressure, you understand!

FTL Pattern making!  Project launch...

OK, a few weeks before Christmas I downloaded a pattern for a jacket from Burdastyle.   It was their Stinchcomb man's jacket pattern.

The first thing to do with the pattern was to print it out...  All 67 pages of it!  And the instructions...  And then asses what I had.  This was a fairly traditional jacket pattern, including lining, but made for speed tailoring, and with less structure than I really wanted.  So I needed to add the extra levels of internal structure once I had the main jacket cut.  I had to use speed tailoring methods on this one for two reasons: the first is time.  There was no way do this with hand worked pad stitching in the time available, and anyway, as this is a test piece in many respects, and being made from a poly/wool mix from the stash that must have cost all of £3.50 per meter, I wasn't gonna bother!  The expensive lovely pure English woven wool I have for the other suit will get the gold treatment, but not this!  OK?  'k...  :)

So I started with a glue stick, the rotary cutter fitted with a 'used' blade saved for paper cutting, the cutting mat and the ruler, and set to work...