50's wool bomber jacket

I never posted this??? This post was from spring 2024… I present it without the usual pattern/size/materials summary in order to get it out of drafts….

I started this little project over Christmas holidays and characteristically let it get bigger and more complex than it honestly had any business being, set it aside for months because economics and another project took priority, and then finished it in an afternoon in the spring.

The jacket pattern is Butterick 3411, a 1950s pattern. I made view 2, with the pockets from view 3, and modified it only in that I applied the neck binding fully above the body and placket, rather than having the placket run top to bottom.

I chose a lightweight wool suiting from my stash for the project, which drapes quite nicely. I’m pleased with how the sleeve gathers look in it, in particular. I don’t know what I was thinking when I zeroed in on this project for the wool, but I didn’t think at all about what to do about binding, and there sure is a lot of it for the view I chose. Not having anything resembling a match on hand, I took some plain cotton ribbing and attempted to avocado dye it. Mostly a bust. I did the dye job with scouring, alum, and soy milk soaking, but the colour came out a rather weak pink. Still, I stuck to using it.

The design itself has a grown on sleeve, which makes for easy sewing of course. Probably the trickiest bit of the whole assembly was getting the bottom binding on, with gathering up the pockets as well as the body to the right width. That is, the trickiest aside from the fact that I decided to make my own buttons for it…

So the buttons are shower rings I found at Nefelibata, the local thrift craft store, which I covered in self fabric, attached a small self-covered button to the back of, and added a shaft using decoration hanging wires which I cut to length and sanded. I made a video of the process on Instagram. The resulting buttons are cute, but maybe a touch cuter than I’d intended, due mostly to their large size. Realistically I won’t ever replace them though.

The guts are finished pretty cleanly with a few different seam solutions applied. The front binding is turned under, the shoulder seams are frenched, the side seams are bias bound, and the back seam is pressed open and felled, which provides a nice pair of lines of stitching at the back. The places where ribbing is attached are simply finished with a faux serge stitch. I used a tag given to me by a friend in the mail, so it has no rhyme or reason but makes me happy to see.