Back to the cutting board...

I got the 2nd go at the Neue Mode jacket complete to the sleeves; it was looking pretty good.

Until I tried to put in the sleeves.

I had something like 1 1/4" too much ease in the front, after I *thought* I had painstakingly walked the seams to make sure I didn't.

I pondered what to do.  At some point, I wished I had an already-tweaked TNT jacket to compare the pattern to, but I didn't.

Or did I?

I wore one of my McCall's 5191 jackets to work last week, and when I got home that night I realized...that one might do.

Now, I looked hard at the McCall's jacket and it is wide on the shoulders, with a shallow sleeve cap.  I don't think I'd be comfortable in it had I not made it from lycra-blended fabric. But, taking that into account, I compared the Neue Mode jacket to the McCall's and found that I still needed to raise the underarm (cough) slightly. 

 You can see the two iterations of underarm-raising clearly...I ended up raising it something like 2", and adding a good bit of fabric just in front of the lower armsceye.

Once I had the  armsceye adjusted, I began to work on the sleeve to make it match. 

The Neue Mode sleeve was actually rather large on me anyway, so I narrowed it  by slashing from the cap to the hem and overlapping the sleeve cap.    I did it to both in front of and behind the shoulder point, and that resulted in a need to shorten the cap height to true up all the seams.

But I was still over an inch too long in the front.  I finally took a wedge out of the front, tapering to to nothing by the back seam.

I have a weird looking sleeve, but it does actually kind of resemble illustrations I have seen in old pattern books.  So who knows. 

Finally, I ended up narrowing the back at the lower armsceye, where I had a pouf of fabric.

So I took apart the muslin, trimmed down the pieces that could be trimmed down, cut some of the new ones from pieces that had to be replaced, and ended up cutting a new front and side front.




So it's ready for the 3rd time.  If this one looks bad, I may just ditch the pattern for the time being and  try one from a pattern company whose sloper is more familiar for my black denim jacket.

And, you know, I was cutting , so I also cut out  a first go at the Sewing Workshop's Helix pants...to which I have, whaddya  know, added pockets.  A turquoise Jalie top and a black-and-gray strip Jalie t.

A goodly number of these garments will work for SWAP, but I'm not sure I'm going to finish.  The Refashion/reversible requirement may KO me at the last minute.  I had a plan for that...a silk blouse that's been cut out and in the queue for a REALLY long time, using buttons I'm removing from a worn-out version of the same pattern.  But the SWAP plan is turning out to be fairly casual and I'm not sure a silk blouse will be 'sympathetic' to the rest of the collection.

And I'm losing an  entire weekend in April to a sudden out of town trip.

We'll see...