Burda 6337 A Quilted Jacket

The latest addition to my me-made outerwear  collection is a quilted jacket inspired by my favorite RTW Bernardo jacket. 

Me-Made

Inspiration Jacket 

I have just published a comprehensive review of the pattern at Pattern Review which talks about  the fitting and design alterations I made. This post will focus mainly on the construction. 

Fabric

Mind the Maker Strip Thelma Quilted Coating Fabric

I used a pre-quilted outerwear fabric which I bought from Minerva.com. The fabric consisted of two layers of woven polyester sandwiching a layer of thin polyester wadding. There is no right or wrong side hence a lining was not essential. 

I was not really a fan of the wide vertical quilting lines as I preferred a more interesting quilting design.  But I was in love with the warm toned mustard color. So I decided to play around with layout and added some of my own quilting lines to the fabric. 

I used single layout to cut the pattern pieces and used the cut fabric as the pattern for the corresponding mirror piece. 

This is the side bodice piece with narrower quilting lines. 

I redrafted the original pattern so that the bodice would have a waistline. That allowed me to play with the direction of the quilting lines. As seen here, the lower part has vertical quilting lines as opposed to the horizontal ones on the upper part. 

The two-piece sleeves provided another opportunity for quilting design.  This time I sewed additional quilting lines perpendicular to the original, at 1" width. This not only added an interesting contrast but it also saved me the trouble of having to match the quilting lines at the seams. 

Because the jacket was not lined, it necessitated a nice finishing for the inside seams which was achieved by Hong Kong binding. This was the most time-consuming part of the construction. I made a continuous bias loop using fabric "harvested" from the quilted fabric. I have seen matching bias tapes from the  Mind the Maker but I did not have luck looking for an online retailer that carries it. 

I cut a 12" square from the main fabric. 

It was easy enough to unpick the quilting stitches and remove the polyester wadding. 

I ended up with two perfectly usable piece of square fabrics to make my continuous bias loop. 

For the inside seams finishes, I used 1" wide bias strips. 

I trimmed some of the polyester wadding from the seam allowance so the bound seams would not be too thick. 

Here is a sample of the bound seams. 

 A look at the bound seams on the finished garment. 

Even though I have done Hong Kong binding and continuous bias loop before, I always like to refresh myself by referring to the wonderful tutorials at Itch to Stitch. 

All the outer edges (collar edge, front opening, bottom and sleeves) are finished by being enclosed in a bias tape. The seam allowances are first trimmed accordingly. For these I used a wider strip (1-1/2") so I could fold the strip on the inside. 

Collar finished with bias binding. 

Sleeve and bottom.

Zippers

One of the things I love about my RTW inspiration jacket is the rose gold zippers that are like jewels that brighten an otherwise basic jacket. So I used Riri zippers with shiny copper teeth for the pockets and front opening. 

Riri metal one-way zipper size M4 from Pacific Trimming. 

Riri two-way separating zipper in size M6. 

Although the pattern envelope specifies a specific length for the zipper to be used on the front opening, my advice is to wait until the jacket has been fully assembled before buying the zipper. That way, it can be customized to the correct length. Of course, one can always trim the zipper on the top and either reuse the metal stop (good luck with that) or stitch a heavy bar of buttonhole thread across the tape (again good luck with that!)

The extra zipper tape is just folded to the inside and sewn. The metal stop prevents the zipper pull from being accidentally removed. 

And now here are some photos of the finished jacket. I had a small amount of fabric left which I made into a matching bag That will be for another post.