A Halloween Jacket

 Recently I took an on-line class from a woman named Deb Canham on making an embellished jean jacket using both the sewing machine and serger. The pattern she was making for the class was called the Stacie Jean Jacket. In the lead up to the class, we were shown examples of ideas of what we could make. The two examples she showed us were a jacket made from Kaffe Fassett fabrics and a seasonal fabric jacket made from Halloween fabric. Before her class, I was thinking maybe muted Kaffe colors, but when Deb showed her Halloween Jacket I got all excited. Sulky had had a webinar with a woman by the name of Desiree Habicht of Desiree’s Designs a couple of weeks before. During the seminar she made a steampunk Pumpkin Pouch. During the seminar she showed off her Halloween fabric line.  After the webinar was over I searched and found most of the line of her steam punk Halloween fabric. I bought it to make, I don’t know, I just liked it. I don’t buy without a purpose often anymore but, I really liked the fabric. The fabric line came with a panel of assorted steam punk pumpkins as well as a bird, an owl, butterflies and a cat. 

The coordinating fabric included a range of gear fabric in assorted colors and a border print of the cat owl and bird in one border and a range of pumpkins on the other border strip.

Quickly it became apparent that the Stacie Jacket pattern was not going to work. The three-piece front design would not allow for the use of the pumpkin pieces from the large panel.

In my stash I have two jean jacket patterns that I have never even cracked open. I settled on the Jacket Express #218 by Janet Pray, but it would need to be modified, to use the designs from the panel. 

If you look at the pattern cover, there are welt pockets on the piece that would be best for the panel pumpkins and it has a curved bottom hem. I dislike those. On the back, the center back piece was ¾ of an inch too narrow so it would need to be modified as well. for the final jacket, the welt pockets were deleted and side pockets were inserted.

In my stash I found a light brown denim that perfectly matched the fabrics.

This is what I started with:

I ended up not using the black and white stripe fabric which incidentally was not part of the fabric line, but I thought I might use. It turned out to have too much white.

There were not enough smaller steampunk designs on the panel for the entire jacket so, from Urban Threads, I found a steampunk gear embroidery design that worked perfectly for the upper left front of the jacket next to the pocket.

Speaking of the upper pockets, the pocket flaps were fussy cut from the border fabric. The cuffs were first cut out of the pumpkin part of the border, but like the black and white fabric, it was too white and did not work.

 Instead, the cuffs were substituted using more the border print used on the pocket flaps.

Deb Canham’s jackets have lots of embellishment done on the serger. Unfortunately, for me, I do not have the correct size needle for the serger to do a proper chain stitch so I had to switch to couching the threads down using my sewing machine. This is what I used:

Dazzle and Wonderfil soft poly for the couching and not shown a Sulky metallic for the curved vertical lines and a brown Blendables 12 weight for the curved lines on the jacket yolk and center sleeves.

Here is the result. Super cute!