When I need a jacket to quickly lift my outfit up, this jacket really sets off any outfit. The fabric – lurex coating fabric – has such a great shine to it. The shine become more dazzling at night because of the lurex threads.

This is a great fabric to buy as you start building your couture sewing skills. The price is really affordable, and the black base fabric goes with everything!

As you can see, I’ve paired this jacket with a jumpsuit for the theatre and originally paired this jacket with jeans for a night out!

When you start developing your couture skills, it can be frustrating as you learn the tips and tricks to get a sharp looking garment.

I can tell you that this fabric is really forgiving and is easy to sew into any shape you want. Be aware that the more you build support into this fabric, the longer your garment will last.

I used the cotton iron-on interfacing for the collar and facing pieces. You can always use two layers of interfacing if your jacket needs more support.

So I chose the paisley lining in black to line my jacket with. This lining is so user friendly as well. The clever thing with this lining is that it irons at the same temperature as this lurex coating so you know you’ll never intentionally burn your work.

If you’re a couture beginner, invest in a walking foot for your machine. This lurex coating has a prominent white boucle line spread evenly along the fabric. Make sure you pin every white line to match at every seam you sew. Don’t worry too much about matching the blue lines. You won’t notice these lines but you certainly will notice the white lines not matching.

Here’s another tip. Check your sewing machine stitch length. Increase the stitch length from 2 to 3 so you can easily unpick your seams it they move out of line while you sew them.

This Burda 6581 has one short jacket style and two longer jacket styles. I picked the short jacket style – view A – for that classic jacket look.

Now because this coating has a lot of body, I went up a size and made 14. I’m really glad I did. This coating takes a lot of room and I didn’t have the heart to trim back the seams to give me more wiggle room, so size 14 it is.

Have I said how much I love Burda instructions yet? I love Burda instructions because they make sewing easy to understand and logical for a great result.

Making this jacket to fit me

Sewing is your super power to make any garment fit you. So yes, I made a few changes to this jacket pattern but less that I usually do.

When you look at the line drawing of this pattern, the pattern has a front yoke. The front yoke is a great feature if you want to spice up a plain fabric. But I digress. This wasn’t a feature that made a whole lot of difference for this jacket.

I did shorten the shoulder seam lengths back to 12cm. To do this I folded out the excess length on the pattern pieces. So the fashion fabric pieces and the lining pieces have all been adjusted.

I made a sway back adjustment to the centre back seam so the there is more curve and this pattern piece is a 2cm longer. The back bodice pieces are all now lower than the pattern. If you look closely at the back view, the hem at centre back is lower. That’s noticeable but I can live with that.

I made the same change to the lining pieces for the shoulder seams and back bodice lengths.

This fabric is the real focus of this jacket so I didn’t add buttonsin the traditional sense.

You can see the buttons on the pockets.

I used large black snaps as the closure for this jacket. This keeps the fabric as the focal point of the jacket because the fabric really can’t be over shadowed. When the jacket is open, you can’t see the snaps as they blend into the jacket fabric. Neat huh!

Handsewing

There was no way I was going to play ‘roulette’ machine sewing in the sleeves to this jacket. I always lose. The ‘house’ always wins right.

This time I only sewed the sleeves to the jacket once – by hand. Yes I avoid handsewing where possible.

However,
I’m amazed how quick hand sewing is.
I’m amazed how accurate hand sewing is.
I’m amazed how easy this fabric is to hand sew too.

Yep. I’m amazed.

It has pockets!

In February I made a Classic French Jacket using Susan Khalje’s pattern so the cute lined pockets you can see on this jacket are made using the lower pocket pattern from her jacket pattern.

I finished this jacket on Tuesday night but on Wednesday morning I decided to cut our pockets and sew them on before going to work. I did it and I can’t believe that I did.

If you’re just starting to sew jackets, take your time and be proud of everything you make. You’re investing in your skills and grabbing this fabric for one of your first projects will be a fun and rewarding experience.

Thank you so much Minerva Crafts.