I love a gilet but also love the idea of a jacket with zip off sleeves to become a gilet so with the Twig and Tale Forrester coat pattern in my stash (never made before) I thought why not, let's have a go. Oh and why not quilt it (not done that before either).
I bought some very lightweight denim and the cutest under the sea jersey for the lining. Note that I am very new to sewing and in hindsight a very stretchy jersey type fabric to line a jacket with a lightweight denim which also had some stretch made this a little challenging but I was determined so...
The quilting was a bit tricky, I hadn't expected the material to move and bunch but it doesn't look too bad and I sort of got the hang of it. Constructing the jacket was really straightforward and no problems at all with the instructions. Making the sleeves and adding zips to those was easy enough but it did take a bit of head scratching, chatting to the sewing social peeps and looking at readymade examples to work out how the to get the zips into the arms holes to attach the sleeves without too much bulk for the sewing machine and not having the zips really visable. I ended up having a go at bias binding (done on a bag ish but not on a garment yet) both the lining and the outer fabric and then sewed the zip in between, which has worked okay. The zip is visable at the top but I've decided I'm okay with that.
I've added an 'Inperfectly perfect' label as I think that describes it very well haha, some parts are far from neat but I'm super happy I managed to make it. I am thinking about adding some rib knit cuffs to the sleeves but other than that very happy 😊
