Completed: Vogue 1127 Suit

Vogue 1127, the Badgley Mischka suit, is finished! I have been so busy that I have hardly been able to find time to work on it. Not to mention, I have been a TERRIBLE blog friend and not reading and leaving comments. I hope that this week I will be able to catch up on all my blog reading, but in the meantime I wanted to get some photos taken of the suit.

While this was not a difficult suit to make...in fact, the construction was quite simple...I found it very tedious to make three separate pieces of the same outfit. I don't think that my attention span is long enough to sucessfully make ensembes. I am more of a "one off" kind of person. But, let's get on to the review of the outfit.

For the suit, I used the cobalt boucle that I got from Fabric.com when they put the Vera Wang fabrics on sale for $1.95 a yard. I purchased 5 yards, and still have half of it. The suit did not take very much fabric. I also purchased a yellow/fuscia thai silk for the shell, and a lining in yellow:


Let's start with the jacket, which has already been reviewed on this blog. The jacket is a raglan sleeved jacket with a very wide, stand-up collar:


It also is cropped, which is hard to see in the line drawing or in the model photo, since she is slouching forward in all of the images:


The issues that I faced with the jacket were as follows:

• The sleeves were very wide, and long. I had to put a very deep hem into them.
• The jacket was also unlined except for the sleeves, which I found odd for a designer pattern. I drafted a lining for the entire jacket.
• The jacket is very short, which is not a problem, but it is not immediately apparent from the images on the pattern. Since I also have not sewn many raglan sleeves (in which the bodice pieces are very short anyway), it also did not occur to me until after I had it cut out. I put a very small hem in to lengthen it.
• I wasn't able to use my mechanical buttonholer on the jacket because the fabric was too thick for the attachment to move it. I also am completely incapable of handsewing neatly, so there was no chance that I was going to be able to handsew the buttonholes, so I used giant snaps instead and just sewed the buttons (that I paid more for than the fabric) to the outside of the jacket.
• I had to use a really heavy interfacing in the collar, because otherwise it would not stand up the way that it was illustated, my boucle was just too floppy.

Here is the finished product:

And the snaps:

And the yellow lining:


The second piece that I completed was the skirt. It is a very simple pattern, just two pieces and a facing. It sits slightly below the waist, as illustrated in the line drawing:


I had already made the skirt once, in a sage and black herringbone:


From the "test-run" I found that there were a number of changes that I wanted to make. First, I wanted to lengthen it, as I found it to be exceptionally short. I also found that the size 20 that I cut, while it matched my measurments, had too much ease. So, I made the second version in an 18, and then tapered in at the waist, and also pegged the bottom more. I also lengthened it by 3 inches. Here is the finished product:

Making the skirt with the boucle also reavealed one other change that I needed to make. Because the boucle is so thick, I had to stitch down the seam allowances to make them lie flat. Otherwise they wadded up and made little lumps on my hips. I used the same yellow lining in the skirt that I did in the jacket.

Finally, the shirt. The shirt is a simple pull-over shell, with mock turtleneck and buttons at the back of the collar. Here is the line drawing:


And the pattern image:


I made the shirt from a silk that was woven with pink threads in one direction and yellow in the other. I also washed the silk which made it much drapier than it was originally, but also cut some of the sheen. I found some apricot-colored pearl buttons for the back of the neck:


For the shirt, I did not follow the instructions at all. I left off the tie at the neck, and rather than facing the armholes, I bound them instead. I also finished the shirt using french seams. I also tapered the shirt at the waist, since it is pretty much a shapeless sack.


Here is the finished shirt. I followed the instructions for gathering the neck, but I have to say that I am not happy with how it looks. It is not gathering like it should, there is just too much fabric there. Perhaps my fabric is heavier than what was initially intended. I may redo it with an ungathered mock neck:


Here is the whole outfit, ready to go to work:


I prefer the top of the jacket open, otherwise the top doesn't show at all under the jacket:


I will probably wear the suit a couple of times before deciding what to do with the collar, perhaps I will like it better after I see it in action!

Edited to add, the weather has been too rotten here to actually wear the suit to work, but since Fridays are casual, I decided to break out the jacket today:


Fortunately, there are so many colors in the boucle that it matches just about anything.