Dark Forest Fitted Suit Jacket
Garment
Design
This suit jacket took heavy inspirations from turn of the century Edwardian and Late Meiji/Taisho fashion, with a bit of a flare of 80s business woman. This was the first project where I not only started to play with the patternmaking but also the fabrication in earnest.
Fabrication
So, with this suit I dyed the wool in a Shibori method called Mokume (wood grain). To achieve said effect, I took the pink wool, and hand stitched vertical rows with the white thread. Which, only took a couple of weeks as I was doing it on my way to and from class on the lightrail. Once stitched, all I had to do was cinch the wool, which as you can see already starts to give the wood grain texture. I had to use leather weight thread as even tex 80 thread snapped during the cinching process due to the thickness of the wool adding more resistance to the cinching. Now, as anyone knows, wool felts, and I wasn’t able to get my hands on acid dyes and instead had to rely on Ritz, which involves dyeing the wool in hot water. To minimize felting I had to slowly heat and cool the water, and stir it as gently as possible. Which, was a two and a half day process. A.k.a. my entire weekend. But the end results were more than worth it.
Patternmaking
This time started with a women’s five panel princess seamed suit block. From the get go, had to make it longer and drop the waist. After that worked on dropping the armhole and widening the upper back and shoulders. From there I patterned crescent shaped cap sleeves. I went for the smaller version as the larger version in my opinion looked like a chef’s hat. After that was patterning pockets. So many pockets. And functional sleeve vents, which aren’t hard to pattern, but really hard to sew.
