A light grey, fine waled corduroy gilet

This is a gilet I recently have finished. It has been made from a light grey, fine waled corduroy. That's to say: the two front pieces. The back part is a grey striped woolen fabric.

As I said in a former post, gilets are easy to make, once you have a pattern that produces a nice fitting item.

I made this one with pockets that in french are named passepoilé. I am not sure what this is called in english, probably a welt pocket. 

The idea is to stitch two small stripes of fabric on the front side and to fold these inward along an incision that is cut in the front part of the garment. The left and right parts of that incision end in small triangles, which are also folded inside (to be stitched through, later on)

 

This is how it looks like from the front side.

The pockets themselves are fixed by stitching through the upper and lower lines of the folded stripes, including the upper and lower parts of the pocket. Easily said, harder done, but certainly fun to do.

The garment has a black lining on the inner side, and a strip of the corduroy fabric, as the following picture shows. I also provided small interior pockets, just to keep some tickets or some small change. 

The next picture shows inner- and outside pinned together. The two top parts and the left and right parts are not to be stitched in this phase, because they later on have to be sewn to the adjacent parts of the rear section of the garment. 

 

Having attached rear and front parts, the gilet wll be almost finished. Just some button holes, and buttons, and here you are: a nice gilet:

 Good idea to have it combined with the light blue denim shirt I made earlier. 

A pair of trousers, striped fabric.

A couple of weeks ago I came along the Amsterdam Dapper market. Of course I had to take a look at the stall, run by a couple that for many years has been selling there all kind of  fabrics.

This time they had this nice striped one, and I thought it would be fine to make a pair of trousers from this fabric..

So I did. The picture above shows the result.

I have two basic patterns to make trousers. One is the jeans type, with front pockets. The other is the one I made this time, it has pockets in the side seam.

In my opinion, making these pockets is fun. Let me indicate why.

You start with the pattern like in the next picture.

 

The visible part of the pocket entrance is fixed in the upper right corner (or for the pocket vice versa in the upper left of the mirrored pattern), good side up.

 

.Then the item is folded vertical on the center line, and wow, it begins to look like a pocket. The one pictured here is the pocket on the left side of the trousers. The one on the right side has to be mirrored of course.

 

The funny aspect for me is, that when busy, you have to imagine all the time how to model the parts to achieve a good result. Before stitching the pocket to the front part of the leg, you have to make some mental acrobatics too. Kind of dimensional thinking, which for me is fun to do.

The pockets should be sewed to the front legs of the trousers, and then be completed by tapping the bottom of the pockets, before front and back parts of the legs are stitched together along the outside seam.

Making a pair of trousers has more aspects, but in this post I just wanted to deal with making pockets.

So with a big jump, here we are at the finished item:

frontview 

 

and reverse side

These trousers are nice to wear this winter, with the loads of snow we already had overhere.