Tuesday 16 April 2013

Kíli Project - Under Coat: Leather Vest and Trims

I've been working on the under coat lately and more or less finished most of the leatherwork, barring the hems and the surface finish (I'll most likely paint it to make it look less suede). This si what I've got so far:

For the center back seam I had to help ease the leather with some water to flatten it enough to sew it down:
 Here's the result:
 Front view (it still needs a litte cutting to adjust the front opening):
The shoulders turned out a lot more raised than the original and I'm pondering how to deal with it without affecting the mobility of the arms ...

Not being able to go much further with the leather without a fitting first, I dived into the task of sorting out the beautiful, but painfully intricate trims. I've decided that I'll only be happy with the exact same pattern and it has to be embroidered, so there is no way around doing it all from scratch.

I started with some lengths of solid cotton canvas and begun the job of sketching up the pattern:


Havong finished sketching up the pattern, the next step was for the sewing to commence.

Having looked at the original trims the "zig-zag" pattern was sewn on first, so that's where I began:




On the original pattern, the squares were sewn on thereafter, each overlapping the last (and because I'm a bit OCD when it comes to this stuff, that's how I did it. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough thread to finish it off, so the rest will have to wait until tomorrow, but I'm quite pleased with how it looks so far:

And that's all for today! Now, I'll head out to the pub for the Tuseday Irish Session! ^_^

2 comments: