Hello Hive

Happy weekend to us all. Weekends are for chilling and I hope that we are all having the best of time.
I am equally here playing with my sewing machine and doing all I can to push my skill forward.
Practice makes practice they say and today those words hit deeper as I made another milestone in my sewing journey.

Everyday sewing and drafting broadens my knowledge about fashion, sewing and making clothes with neat finishing that will be presentable and sellable at the market.
It is totally true that we cannot learn all about fashion in one day and even our top designers are always working, practicing and trying out their creativity resulting to the new designs being created daily in the fashion world.

One thing I have always shy away from is sewing a
a jacket. The task about sewing a jacket is not an easy one, if you look at a jacket closely with all the details it contains you will agree with me that it will take only skills and creativity to achieve a perfectly fitted suit. Whenever it comes to sewing jacket I often shy away from such task, but for how long will I continue to hide?

Eventually I decided to try a jacket like pattern today, this is called a shawl collar jacket and I'm using a clients African print fabric.

I started with the basic bodice and drafted out the back pattern here

Next I continued with the front pattern and drew out the extension for the overlapping by 4" and then the shawl collar part here.
I continued drawing several linea and learning from every stroke to ensure that the shawl collar comes out nicely.

I have used my basic knowledge of fashion to draft out a simple bodice pattern which I then extended to form the over lapping and the shawl collar.Using the pattern I had cut out the different pieces of the fabrics here

Next I started stitching each piece together. Stitching is always one of the easiest things to do but with a jacket and especially one in which I wanted to close the inseam allowances everything was looking challenging

This is me trying to close in the seam allowances of the zipper section after fixing the zipper.
This was the hardest part for me.
I spent the whole of today trying to get this right and every possible new knowledge there is to gain

Having done all of these I wouldn't be sure if I got this right until the owner of the design puts it on and it doesn't show the cleavage or it's fits her well.
This is the first part of this design and will give you a feedback of wether I achieved a success with this or not.