Collage It! Counterpoints Jacket and Template Set 1–Sweatshirt Style
Posted on 18. Apr, 2010 by Gail Yellen in Blog
All of the signs of spring are popping up in Connecticut–even the temperatures (most of the time.) It’s getting a bit warm to wear Collage It! Counterpoints jackets made from up-cycled felted wool sweaters, so I decided to try out the technique with re-cycled sweatshirts. And guess what? It works great! The Counterpoints Jacket pattern, Template Set 1 and 5 sweatshirts were used. There’s plenty of leftover sweatshirt fabric, but I wanted to have 5 different colors–white, off-white, blue, taupe and a pinkish-red.
There are a few really great shortcuts worth mentioning. No felting necessary! What’s more comfortable than sweatshirt knit against your skin? Sweatshirt fleece is a stable knit, so no need to interface or line–hooray! But instead of tear away stabilizer, use a wash away since the wrong side will show. I had a roll of tear away, but no wash away and wanted to get started on this jacket so that it would be at least partially finished before the Original Sewing & Quilt Expo in Worcester and I could have it in our booth to show customers. Didn’t snap an “in progress” pic–too busy progressing, but here are a few of the finished jacket. I love it. The actual jacket construction was done on my serger using a 4-thread overlock stitch.
Here’s a close-up of the back wrong side. Bits of the tear away stabilizer are still under the stitching. It will probably disintegrate after several washings.
Here’s the wrong side of the sleeve. I used wash away stabilizer–no tidbits left.
This is the bust dart. It’s constructed with butted seams also. The triangle fabric of the dart is cut away and the edges are butted together and stitched using a 3-step zigzag.
I decided to match the angle of the front taupe piece when positioning the buttonhole. (Note the box of stitching around the buttonhole.) Here’s a tip for great looking machine- made buttonholes on any fabric type. Save the small leftover pieces of wash away stabilizer from other seams and place a piece over the buttonhole marking before stitching. It prevents any distortion on the fabric and also allows the buttonhole stitching to lay beautifully on top of the fabric. It’s subtle, but if you make a buttonhole on sample fabric without wash away stabilizer and another right next to it with stabilizer, you’ll see the difference. It’s amazing.
A small rectangle of the binding fabric stabilizes the wrong side of the buttonhole and creates a pretty design detail. The edges were stitched with a narrower (3.5 mm width) 3-step zigzag.
This is the edge of the pocket. To hold it flat and smooth, again the 3-step zigzag stitch was used.