Exercising in Style!

One of my favorite items to sew is activewear. Maybe it's because I have found my tried and tested patterns in Jalie. My latest project is a lightweight jacket meant to function as a warm-up piece during the first few minutes of fitness class. Jalie 2679 is a pattern for a soft shell jacket. The recommended fabrics are polar fleece or heavyweight knit. I used a performance fabric made of nylon/spandex and it is more lightweight so I went down one size as far as the pattern pieces were concerned. 

The black fabric is a high performance ATY nylon from Spandex World. I don't know what ATY means but the fabric feels like the ones used in Zella leggings. It is not shiny, feels like cotton, but works like Supplex. It is completely opaque so it's perfect for workout bottoms, too. It weighs  6.78 oz/sq yard, 230 G/sw meter, 310 G/yard. I use the weight as a basis of comparison when buying activewear fabrics online. To add a bit of interest and to save some of the precious black fabric, I used some print blocking. The animal print fabric also from Spandex World is lighter weight but still with the same four way stretch so combining the two fabrics in one outfit was okay. 

Here is the back view.

Close-up of the collar.

My unexpected pop of color in the pockets' zippers.

View of the inside.

And now some construction notes:

This pattern was pretty straightforward and easy to sew. But that does not mean it's a quick project. Areas which required a little bit more attention and care included the pocket construction and zipper attachment. Since I used lightweight nylon zippers on the pockets, it wasn't as tricky. I've sewn another version for someone else using sports zipper and the larger more bulky zipper stop proved to be challenging and took some trial and error. Aligning the intersecting seams at the front opening edges was easily achieved by marking both sides of the zipper where there were intersecting seams and basting them first. 

Another tip is to reinforce any edge where zipper was sewn by using strips of tricot interfacing shown below alongside the zipper.

Front edge opening.

Taking a cue from the pop of pink provided by the zippers, I decided to sew another workout top using my TNT pattern Jalie 2444. I have sewn several tops using this pattern before and some of them can be seen in one of my earlier blog posts here.

I had to go up one size as my fabric had less stretch than usual and I also added 2' to the hem, not that I've grown some but I found the earlier ones I've sewn to be a tad short. 

I plan to sew more using both of these patterns. Now I'm off to tweak some workout leggings that I couldn't seem to get right.