Starting at the Beginning: The Bonnie Prince Charlie Jacket

I've been a busy bee sewing up a storm over here at My Happy Sewing Place.  You may recall that I set out at the beginning of June to make the Big 4.  I hope you're not too disappointed that this became more realistically paired down to the Big 2 including the Bonnie Prince Charlie Kilt Jacket and the white tie waistcoat.  I know you're probably bummed that I didn't have time to make up my Gilda gown or garden party dress but I know you're a resilient bunch.  Plus, given that I already have two gowns in my wardrobe and quite a few dresses (and hats) that could pass for a garden party, I figured it was best to focus my attention on the man who would be crossing the graduation stage!

So let's start at the beginning...

This was entirely a joint sewing project with David (and of course help from our esteemed sewing assistant, Echo).  David cut out all the fabric for both the muslin and the final jacket and waistcoat.  The Bonnie Prince Charlie Jacket has a lot of pieces including jacket, lining and interfacing pieces.

Echo was the perfect pattern weight.  Any time we laid out the fabric she was on it in 5 seconds flat!  We used a nice mohair/wool blend for the muslin (which we will revisit to make another Bonnie Prince Charlie jacket) and 100% British wool for the final jacket.

You can sort of see from the photo that the British Wool is a delicious midnight blue colour and we used black duchess satin for the lapel.  I am super excited because David's going to do a guest post tomorrow about the whole process of sewing up the jacket, waistcoat and bowtie together.  It's a fantastic story filled with highs and lows, tears, sheer will, late nights, seam rippers and silly photos.  There were no divorce papers--on the contrary, doing what I call high-stakes sewing (i.e. big events like graduation, weddings, etc.) has been an amazing experience albeit one that we'll probably only do once (teehee).  But I'll let David tell you all about that story....