Winter is coming. What that means for this sewist living in one of the world’s coldest cities is so many layers. All of the layers. Swaddled baby amount of layers. Mary Kate Olsen circa 2006 layers. If it doesn’t take me 5 minutes to get undressed for bed every night, I’m doing it wrong. Since I am the kind of person who sort of timbers into bed each night out of pure exhaustion, and am terrible at tidying up after myself, I basically have a swimmable mountain of clothing in a pile next to my bed at the end of every week until I become utterly disgusted with myself and put everything away. This knit jacket/shawl/blanket thing has definitely been in that particular mix for the last two months.
It is, of course, the Sydney Jacket from Tessuti. Oh Tessuti, I can never, ever spell your name correctly and have to google it every.single.time. (same with the lovely Megan Nielson – what is it with Australians and hard to remember spellings?!) I love the patterns these ladies release. They basically make up the dream wardrobe of the really cool art teacher you had in high school who let you hang out in the dark room teaching yourself how to develop photographs. The cool art teacher living inside of me loves this jacket.
The pattern is interesting – it calls for non-fraying fabric like boiled wool, because all of the edges are raw and the seams are overlapped and topstitched into place, rather than sewn together and pressed open. Can you imagine a more perfect Winter Is Coming layering piece than a long, unstructured jacket in boiled wool? You can? I don’t believe you. For my first (of many – wait till you see the black speckled wool that is cut and ready in the queue!), I decided to be bold and use this absolutely insane doublefaced knit I scored at the last Montreal meet-up we had. Textured snakesin on one side and cream with silver metallic stripes on the other, it is truly bananas, and I deeply regret not buying the entire bolt.
I ignored their fabric recommendations this time since the edge of this knit doesn’t roll, and because the folded collar of the coat is exposed, it made sense to have something lovely on the inside too. Otherwise, I followed the same construction process outlined in the instructions. The only modifications I made to the pattern were to skip the pockets – I just barely squeezed it out of the scant two yards I had.
Btw, taking these pictures was a nightmare. It was freezing cold but I was stiff-upper-lipping it and trying to set up the camera in the alley where I take pictures so I don’t have to deal with Looksies and Whatchadoins. I love this grey garage door, and as I’m setting up the tripod and fiddling with my camera settings, some dude hangs outside the french doors above and is just casually watching me, and then asks what I’m doing. “Je prend des photos pour mon blog Monsieur. Ça va?” “Ah oui, ça va, ça va.” He then proceeded to watch me from 15 feet above for the next 5 minutes. Does anyone have any strategies for dealing with this type of behavior? Granted, I’m taking weird photos of myself in a billowy blanket in front of your garage door, but seriously guy. Give a sewing blogger at least the illusion of privacy.
And what are you layering on like an Olsen in a tundra these days?
