New to me – Rosa by Wear Lemonade

Hello everyone! This is my first post on The Monthly Stitch and I hope you enjoy my latest project (and contest entry for Week 1 of Indie Pattern Month) – My first jacket!

This is the Rosa jacket from Wear Lemonade, a small French indie pattern company. I was so pleased when I realised that I’d started this after the contest announcement and that it would be submissable!

It’s a fully lined bomber jacket with in seam pockets and metal popper buttons. I added my own thing to it with some embroidery on the back!

The pattern is actually quite easy to make once you figure out the instructions. I hadn’t realised it only came in the original French! Luckily they have YouTube instruction videos on each of their patterns so anything I didn’t understand, I could work out visually from that but mostly Google Translate did the hard work for me! There were still a couple of bits where neither the video or Google could help me so I just winged it. I figured there’s only so many ways you could make this so it’s more than likely right!

(By the way, if anyone out there is struggling on translating the instructions let me know and I can totally help you out!)

I used a navy blue and silver duchesse satin for contrasting bodice and sleeves. I cut all my pieces first but before I could sew anything I had to get my embroidery done!

I blocked a section of this peacock print fabric onto some bondaweb and carefully cut out the peacock shape (and flowers) ready to be appliquéd onto the back of the jacket.
Of course just sticking it down with bondaweb wouldn’t be enough to hold it in place forever so I opted to use some freehand machine embroidery to stitch over the top of it to create texture, add colour and strength.

This was not a challenge for the faint hearted. It took forever to finish!!

The final outcome, though, was totally worth it!

I used a polka dot cotton lining to finish it off. I’ve never lined anything like this before and it was an interesting experience to say the least – the sleeve cuff bit was totally weird and I still don’t quite get out it works… But it does! And that’s what’s important!