Thrifted Leather Jacket: Deconstruction and Recreation (Pic Heavy)

 

I've been working hard on my entry for the Refashion contest over at PR, and taking a whole whack of pictures.  I'm serious, a Whole Whack of them.  I'm going to share all the fun I've had with taking apart and cutting out pattern pieces from this leather coat

DECONSTRUCTION:

I noticed a lot of neat things about this jacket while taking it apart.  Some are design features, other are construction methods, and I thought I'd share some of my favourites here.

This leather jacket is made up of smaller leather pieces seamed together. One of the things that impressed me was how they incorporated the slit (???) pocket and bound buttonhole along the seamline at the hip.  I thought this was a great idea, and really shows the quality of this jacket (it's by Danier, btw, and the leather is so soft and supple). 

I like that they included a piece of leather inside the pocket so that you don't see the pocket lining fabric from the outside of the coat.  I learned this lesson on my corduroy jacket's welt pockets, but it's nice to see a good example of how such a little detail can make such a difference.  Especially if your pocket lining material is bright.

Because the bound buttonholes were so thick, they made a tall shank at the base of the buttons, and then anchored the button with a smaller one of the backside for more support.  If I were doing buttons on my jacket, I'd definitely use this trick to avoid tearing through the leather.  Plus it's a bit cleaner looking on the underside.

Love how their collar turned out. The points are so sharp!  Impressive considering how bulky the leather can be.

You can also see how they topstitched the horizontal seamlines and left the vertical seams alone. This tends to emphasize the horizontal seams and lets the vertical seams disappear a bit more, which helps prevent a patch-quilt sort of look

On the inside, I noticed that all of the seam allowances were glued down, and the horizontal seams were all interfaced.  Not sure about the reasoning for the latter, but I totally stole the former idea.  It's really helpful because you can't actually iron down the seam allowance at all.

I admit, I stopped and petted the suede inside for a while.  SO SOFT!

They bagged the lining, and managed to make both the bottom hem and sleeve hem with no stitches.  I was impressed with how they did this without the hem dropping at all.

Turns out the answer is some sort of interfacing (web? woven? I don't know my interfacings) along the hem where it folds up, and then glue the heck out of the hem. I guess this provided some stability (with leather?) or perhaps kept the fold sharp (???), and the glue helped hold it in place.  Totally stealing this idea. 

RECONSTRUCTION:

So basically, I ripped off the lining, dropped the hem and opened the facings, took off the sleeves and collar, and split the shoulder seam to make a flat piece of fabric.  You can see the first piece laid out on the jacket: the front panel. It was supposed to be cut on the fold so that it's self-faced, but I couldn't do that with my fabric.  I chose to cut out 4 of the front panel and sew two together.

Except there wasn't enough space to cut the facings directly from the jacket. I'd have to patch it.

Hacked off the pocket section

Used binder clips to hold leather pieces together (can't pin leather or else the pin marks would be noticeable)

Try to line up vertical seamline

Stitch, then trim and glue down seam allowance

Topstitch on either side of seamline

Notice afteward that your vertical seamline weren't aligned. Give up and cut out facing piece

Of course, then I messed up.

I forgot to take pictures, but you can see my whining about it over on the contest discussion boards.

The biggest problem was that getting all the pieces I needed was going to be tight as it was.  I actually had to walk away from this all for a couple days because of how upset I was.

When I came back to it, I started on the upper part of the two piece sleeve, which was going to be in leather.  I cut it out from the original jacket's sleeve, but had to patch on a piece to the bottom due to the pattern sleeve being a bit longer and the grossness of the original jacket's sleeve hem.  Used the same method as above.

This leather, btw, is beautiful to work with.  I've been using size 12 sharp needles instead of leather needles, and there hasn't been any problems.  Well, there was one, but I'll talk about that in a sec.

Once I got through the sleeves, I went back and frankensteined a new inside facing, being extra cautious to cut it the right way.  You can see the new frankensteined facing piece on the left above, and the front panel on the right.  I took great care to make sure that the two front panels matched as much as possible, and that the seamlines for the patched facings were not lined up with the seamlines of the front panels to reduce bulk.

I then stitched the front panel and facing together.  I don't have pics here right now, but I had two problems with this:

1. The seam curves a bit inward at the top and bottom, so the whole front line of the jacket looks a bit curved. I decided that I can live with this, because unpicking leather is hard.
2. I chose to topstitch along the edge of this seam, and I broke a needle half way going over the fankensteined facing seamlines.  Oh well, I'll just use a stronger needle next time.

 

I forgot to mention, but before stitching everything together, I decided to freshen up the leather a bit.  Many internet sources suggested using a mix of lemon juice and olive oil, so I did just that.  The lemon juice cleaned the leather, and the oil added moisture.  The test strip above was taken from directly adjacent to the piece it's laying over, and you can see the difference it made!

This is all that's left of the jacket after I was through with it.  Unusable scraps to the right, and possibly useful pieces to the left.  And in fact, I'm going to have to get the 4 triangular shoulder yokes from these scraps somehow because there is literally none of the wool jacket left to cut them out. 

I'm a bit proud of how I've managed to use up all the material from these jackets!  Let's hope that the final result turns out.  If it doesn't though, I've learned a heck of a lot on this project.  :)

If you managed to get through this extremely long post, thanks so much for your patience!  I didn't realize it would be such a beast until I was half-way through it.