What to do with boiled wool?

I bought this gorgeous boiled wool fabric from the fabric store in their winter sale last year, took it home and then thought “What the heck and I going to do with this?” I really didn’t have anything in mind when I bought it and it’s quite a thick heavy fabric, actually it’s so thick it would make a great blanket!

So, anyway I thought I’d make a poncho.

I just cut a slit in the middle and sewed a collar onto that. I was a bit cavalier about it I know and the result speaks for itself. I look like I’m wearing a blanket!!

So I hung it in the wardrobe where it was out of sight out of mind until I came across the perfect pattern in a Burda magazine at my local library.

I traced the pattern out, made it up and voila! Now I’m a happy girl.

This pattern has the seams on the outside which look great in the magazine in that gorgeous mustardy yellow colour but when I sewed the stripes together with seams on the outside it looked a bit busy. So, I unpicked and sewed the back seams up normally and then it looked boring. Mmmmm so, more unpicking later and I ended up sewing it up with the seams on the outside but I topstitched them down on each side of the seam so they didn’t stick up so much and I think it is a much better result.

This is a really nice pattern but the thing with these Burdastyle patterns is there are no pictures to help with the instructions so you really need to have a bit of sewing experience and I could not make head nor tail of the instructions for the pocket part so in the end, after a bit of head scratching I worked out a way of slapping these babies in!! In fact I didn’t take much notice of any of the instructions.

I basted the zipper onto the jacket and then to cover up the zip edges on the inside I pinned a small strip about 2cm wide to the back before I top- stitched the zip in. Then I hand stitched around the top of the zipper so there were no raw edge of the zip showing.
What I love about this fabric? There is nooooo hemming.

    

Materials

Boiled wool from the fabric store, Burdastyle magazine December 2012 – Hooded pattern number 139, cotton, metal open-ended zip