Finished Object: Quilted Jacket

Finished! My first garment in over a decade.

Sometime in the fall of 2023 I decided I needed a quilted jacket. A friend had gifted me almost 3 yards of fabric from Concord Fabrics, and I thought it’d be the perfect fabric to see if I’m a floral print person.

Fabric note: I believe this print is called "flower pot floral." One user on Etsy claims it's from the 1970s but I haven’t been able to confirm that anywhere else. There is no designer attributed on the selvedge edge, so I don’t believe this is part of the Joan Kessler floral line.

I selected The Ilford Jacket from Friday Pattern Co. after seeing a few other quilted jackets floating around on Instagram. I don’t know much about reading and understanding sewing patterns, but I thought this is one that can serve a few functions. If I enjoyed making the jacket, maybe I could make a shirt? (Spoiler alert: I did make a shirt. And I still don’t exactly understand what the pattern wanted from me in a few spots, so I just made it look like other things in my closet.)

The process from fabric to jacket felt like a long one! I don’t have many photos of the journey saved, but if you follow my stories on Instagram you probably saw me making the quilt sandwiches for each piece, or saw my frustration with learning how to make a button placket. I vacillated between “I’m going to make 1,000 of these! SO FUN” and “omfg how do people do this and find it fun I need a break” a few times in the sessions I was working on this.

And then I had to figure out how to attach snaps to 4 layers of fabric and 2 layers of quilt batting. In the end it was too thick for a heavy duty snap, so I did a little surgery on the two front pieces. If you can spy that little flash of pink on the inside at the snaps, that was me removing part of the quilted piece and adding a single piece of fabric so I could make the snaps work.

In the end I’m pretty dang happy with my quilted coat. It fits, and it looks great with my purple pants.