My broken jacket

I finally finished my jacket...although it took me over a week to get around to hemming the sleeves, creating the buttonholes and putting in the jetted flap pockets.

It hadn't really occurred to me that making the jacket from a pinstripe would create such a masculine look, but actually it feels an unexpectedly k.d lang style of garment...without the benefit of having her fantastic voice when I put the jacket on. The original plain navy jacket that I based this one on doesn't have that feel at all and I think I prefer it that way - I'm not sure I'm tall or angular enough to carry off this look. Which is a good way to feel, because I've had 'an incident' with this jacket.

If I look like I'm clutching my side in pain in the photo above, I sort of am. It's a multi-purpose clutch and one that I'd be forced to do at all times if I ever wore this jacket out of the house. It covers both the problem and the physical pain of realising I'm too silly to multi-task. Unfortunately while I was making the welted flap pockets, I was listening to something very absorbing on the radio and so when I was cutting the final slash to open the welted pocket...I just kept cutting...waaaaayyyy beyond the point at which I should have stopped cutting. While one pocket looks like this:

 The other looks like this:

One would normally set in pockets like this before even beginning to sew the front panels to the back and if I'd done it this way, I would simply have been able to cut a new front panel. My reason for not doing so was that as the pattern was self-drafted I didn't want to invest the time in doing the pockets if I wasn't happy with the fit (frustratingly, the fit is perfect). So they were the very last thing that I did...after binding all the facings, creating the buttonholes, sewing the buttons on and doing a lot of other ultimately pointless but time-consuming things.

If it was a quilt I'd stick a patch over the hole and accept that it was part of its charm, but I lack the hippy spirit required to do this with clothing. It would feel tantamount to going out wearing an eye-patch and pretending to be a pirate. I would feel compelled to point it out to people (like the girl who recently made a gorgeous skirt where the pattern placement inadvertently created an alarming fauxgina...you know who you are! I don't think I ever would have noticed it, but as one commenter on her Instagram feed said - you can't unsee a fauxgina once it's been pointed out to you!). Equally, you can't unsee a strange patch of fabric intended to mask a gaping hole once you've been alerted to it.

So it would seem that this has not been a good week for dressmaking. But I feel undeterred. My husband said, smirking, (smirking very dangerously, when one considers that he did so in the face of a woman with several days of ruined work wrapped around her body!) that he thought a winter version without a hole in it would be great. I'm most excited about this. There will be no holes, no faux-businessman stripes and I will not listen to the radio while I make it (actually that's not true. Listening to Radio 4 while sewing is one of life's greatest pleasures, so I will foolishly risk it again). Does anyone know of a tutorial for inserting a collar just like the one above? I worked it out on my own, but had an hour of turning my brain inside-out to get there. I'm feeling worried about whether I can remember what on earth I did for next time.

Florence x