Don't be so angry little bird

I've decided--once again--that it's maybe time to stop acquiring random cloth and patterns and to start actually making things (well...non-doll things.  I'm still always sewing for dolls, as my Flickr shows.)

So, of course, I start with a re-fashioning of a thing I made a year ago...  The kiddo likes big piles of blankets, which is something we have in common, and I go through phases where I'm happy to sew lots of blankets.  I decided I'd use his too-small Angry Birds and Bad Piggies t-shirts to make a little t-shirt quilt...only...yeah.  I rushed it, and not a thing was on grain, and I tried to force it to align with the backing cloth...and it didn't...no matter how much stitching I did through all layers...

I don't think I ever showed it here, so...taadaa:

...and looking relatively nonwonky thanks to the magic of photography.  The camera lies.

I presented it to him and he immediately forgot about it, so I eventually--quietly--removed it from his blanket stash.  I didn't know what I'd do with it, but the time I'd taken to make the patchwork seemed to make it worth saving.

Since he loves jackets as much as he loves blankets, I decided I'd see if I could squeeze a jacket out of it, once the backing was removed, and I chose this pattern

which is from 1977 (and which I acquired in that gigantic grab bag'o'patterns from the summer.)  The kiddo likes hoodies, so I went with view 2...well...more or less...



I did get the front, back, and both sleeves (with some finagling and areas of combining pieces that hadn't been sewn together before) from the t-shirt patchwork piece, and had more than enough of the green knit I'd used for the lining of this coat to make the hood and wrist and waist ribbing--what's that, you say?  There's no wrist or waist ribbing on that pattern?  Well...yeah...  And the hood isn't supposed to be lined, either, and the pockets aren't supposed to be in the side seams, but here we are.

The body of the jacket is unlined--don't think I didn't consider lining it, but I wanted to keep the actual construction simple.  Especially after I managed to way over-complicate the already-made patchwork part.

'cause, see, in my failed efforts to force the back of the blanket to work with the front of the blanket, I'd had the thought, "Oh, maybe it just needs to be washed aggressively so the relatively new cotton will shrink to fit the very agèd t-shirts!  Sure!"  And that bit of brilliance only managed to speed the  hole development around the seams.

Sooooo I had the idea to reinforce--and, incidentally, cover--those aerated seams.  What better way, I thought, to bring the green knit out of the extremities and onto the body than by using that!  But I didn't want to make it too complicated.  So I cut (rough) strips along the stretch and sewed them on with four lines of stitching each.

The "not too complicated" part is because I left the edges raw...which...this might be the first time I've ever left knit edges raw...

Once all that was done, the whole thing went together super easy--yes, even the parts I improvised.  (I had a photo of a peek into one of the improv pockets, but, honestly, it managed to have a shape that looked...ah...uncomfortably personal.  So I'll just report that I used a coordinating print that came from a pillow I thrifted for the form.  The fact that it's a cheerleader themed print is merely trivia.)  The biggest challenge--although it was more fiddly than challenging--was getting the lined hood stitched, because this knit is supersyntheticslinky.  And, OK, the fact that the zipper I used is an inch or so too long, but I wasn't prepared to cut it to size because I know I may very well salvage it from this jacket in a few years, so I had to stitch around those huge molded plastic teeth when they were hidden inside the enclosed hood/lining combo...yeah, that presented a few problems to solve.  It didn't help that the area where I had to pick out the stitching and re-stitch--the very last, y'know, inch and a half of stitching...that's when the bobbin thread ran out.  (I had a bobbin with some lime green on it, I used that to finalize the stitch, then, since it was  topstitching on lime green, I sewed it from the back, so the pink thread in the top spool could pretend to have been bobbin thread.  Or something like that.)

I even managed not to stretch the cloth along the zipper too much--I didn't notice if it looked that wavy when it was being worn, because the kiddo never stops moving...

I almost scrapped this whole thing when it was assembly time, but I powered through and...it's not bad?  The kiddo seems to like it, and that's what matters, of course.