Brilliant

As in "ooh shiny," not as in "ooh great idea," because, even though it's finished, I'm still not really sure if it was a good idea to put these together

Yes, that's a novelty Halloween thin synthetic knit with foiled skulls.  Thrifted, too.  And that's a pattern I bought somewhere around the turn of the century and had never before used.  And a zipper--scavenged from a thrifted velour jacket--that's about six inches longer than needed.  What could go wrong?

Actually, not much at all.  Huh.  I made sure to remember to switch to a ball point needle whenever the skull knit was being sewn--and remembered to switch to a lightweight sharp while sewing...ah...most of the lining pieces together, the lining being made from an obnoxiously bright green lining material that I, yes, thrifted, still on the roll, a few years ago. I even took the time to switch to fluorescent green thread when assembling the lining, instead of sticking with black.  It's amazing the freedom one feels after one finally acquires more bobbins.  And I used the same waffle knit for the ribbing pieces as I used on the eyeball jacket.  (I do have black rib knit, but...the waffle texture just seems more appealing right now.)

I even mostly followed the directions!  My biggest detour was turning the pocket openings by sewing on single-fold bias tape--also in bright green--instead of folding and pressing and topstitching, because, nope, not with this cloth.

This was, alas, before I had the idea to use the bright green in the bobbin and black in the top, which worked nicely when topstitching around the collar near the end of the project.  And I even managed to mostly limit my topstitching to what the directions called for, too!  Just...did an extra line by each (stabilized) shoulder seam.  The big trepidation about this project was the possibility of every stitch causing wild running/laddering, combined with the fact that the foil made it pretty much vinyl meaning picked-out stitches would leave evidence, so it was easy to convince myself not to topstitch everything. (But, where I did topstitch?  It's lovely.)

I tried the approach to shortening zippers that involves attaching strips of cloth to the top to act as new stops, and was only sort of successful, ad the strips didn't end up lining up.

But that's OK, as it's not too obvious when it's not zipped up all the way

 

...or not zipped up at all

I did consider adding something to stabilize the cloth around the zipper, but I decided, enh, just get it finished, and it's not too bad. (I also...um...pretty sure my sewing machine needs a new belt, because it's getting more and more prone to slipping whenever I try to sew through lots of layers, and there were several places where it was very unhappy with this project, soooo I didn't want to anger it more.)

I will say the sleeve and armscye on this pattern are very well drafted and went together with minimum effort, which makes me happy even when I'm not working with slippery cheap novelty cloth that I expect to start mocking me at any moment.  So that was good.  There were no surprises or instances of weirdness to this pattern, so I might use it again before 15 more years pass.

I'll leave you with another view of the shininess.

So shiny.