A month of months

All the pieces of this jacket are underlined, which meant hand-basting around all the edges of all the pieces. If there is a next time, I would probably line it, as well or instead, because the seam edges are also supposed to be overcast by hand. Well, I can tell you I gave up on that pretty quick and got out the serger. And even that was too much sewing.

The fronts and back are made separately, and before sewn together, the buttons are attached to the tails.


And so begins the saga of the buttons.*

I would like to be an organized person. Some things are well organized, like my sock drawer. Other things are not, like almost every single sewing thing I own. I think I mentioned in a previous post I finally organized my fabric. It is nice.

This jacket requires 33 buttons for the size I made. Covered buttons would look nice, right? I looked in my covered button box and had one package of 5/8" size. So I would need 28. Ugh. Do I order in bulk and get way too many? Do I try to find that many in the fabric store and pay way too much?

I dithered for almost a week.

Then I got a wild hair to organize my three boxes of closures, including the one that contained that one package of buttons. In addition to covered buttons of various sizes, I have pearl snaps, grommets (eyelets), a bunch of vintage self-covered belt kits that I picked up every time I went to a now-defunct craft thrift store, and ... a bunch of covered button kits that I picked up every time I went to a now-defunct craft thrift store.

People, I had 32 buttons total.

Aaaargh!

But wait! gorthx to the rescue with the last remaining button!

But wait! Some packages said 5/8" and some said 9/16". Now I had to figure out how to disperse them so the size difference would not be noticeable. Twelve for the tails, six for the sleeves, and 17 for the front.

Yeah, that doesn't add up to 33. I made the above pictured twelve for the tails, realized I only needed ten, then lost track of which size I made. So measured them, and all the buttons were 9/16", even the ones marked 5/8". *shrug*

I made the buttons at each stage instead of making them all at once, so stay tuned for more button content.

* You can click on the top pic to watch a gif. Who knew you could make animations in gimp.