Tutorial, part 1 - Pattern Pieces

For all of the jacket body (and hem facing) pieces, cut two of your body fabric of choice (wool gabardine or cotton twill) and two of your underlining fabric of choice (we recommend muslin), so that each shell piece has an exact muslin counterpart.

(Yes, this doubles the number of pieces to cut, iron, and keep up with, but it will be well worth it; the interfacing fabric gives the garment more body, weight, dimension, and changes its drape ever-so-slightly.)

Iron all the pieces, then pair each body piece with its corresponding underlining.

Serge all of the body pieces to their underlining mates.

If you don't have a serger (and/or one is not reasonably available), you can also baste, stitch, or zig-zag stitch the two pieces together within the seam allowance; it's not ideal but it's something, at least! 

Here, you can compare a body panel zig-zag stitched to its underlining mate to one serged to it:

We recommend lightly marking the action pleat fold line on the center back (piece F) on the wrong side of the garment and/or with white (or otherwise contrasting) basting thread.

Wrong side

Right side

TIP: the fold line is 2 ⅜" from the edge of the piece, so rather than attempting to freehand mark it or use a tracing wheel, you may wish to just use a see-through quilting ruler and draw a line with the hard edge of the ruler as a guide.

(That's what we did; note that in the pictures above line extends past the bottom of the action pleat ... it doesn't really matter. Nobody but you will see the line, and the basting thread will be removed later.)

Fuse your interfacing to the front yokes (piece A) and back yoke (B). 

Serge all edges of your yokes and yoke facings except the neckline; it will get sewn in and clipped later. 

NOTE: We recommend serging both the yoke and yoke facing using division-color serger threads, or at least something in a similar color range (i.e. overlock a gold yoke with gold thread). We only used black thread on our tutorial jacket because the original jumpsuits apparently did, but the only advantage we see to this is you save a bit of time by not having to change your serger threads during the construction process.


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