Auditioning Fabric for the Next Jacket

Yesterday afternoon I finished the jacket I've named "Just a Peak."  Here you can see the front view.  The back is similar.  I think I made pretty good use of fabric I found in an antique/ thrift shop and in the "trash."  (I don't think I said before that the gray & white fabric was being thrown out by the office furniture maker in the building here.  That's one of the perks of being in a big building like this - someone is always putting out something "valuable" for free-cycling.  It's great.)

So as soon as I finish one jacket, I move right on to planning the next one.

When I start a new jacket, the first thing I do is to go through my fabric stash to see what I might want to use.  This time I found a nice purple cotton with a woven pattern.  Purple is one of my favorite colors lately, but I find I don't have much of it in my stash.  That's probably why this one appealed to me yesterday.

Here's the selection of things I'd pulled out at the end of the day yesterday.  To go with the purple I found a gorgeous cotton sateen hand-dyed by Judy Robertson of Just Imagination, a commercial cotton batik, some rayon thread leftover from our recent kimono project, and some variegated machine threads.  I have been collecting Judy's fabrics since I met her at the Quilt/Surface Design Symposium 4 years ago.  I generally save her fabrics for very special projects, but I think this piece is just what I need to perk up that "plain" purple.


Once I have the basic selection of fabrics I want to work with I usually pick out a pattern or two that I think I can use given the amount of fabric I have.  Then I generally let my ideas stew for at least overnight.  When I'm at this stage I often wake up once or twice during the night and find that various design possibilities have come to mind.  I usually work these things out in my mind or by laying out the fabrics in a rough approximation of the design rather than sketching.  Here's a photo of what I mean.

I am envisioning a style similar to the last one with Judy's fabric in the center front panel, the batik edging the panels, and the rayon threads drizzled down the front.  Oooh and just as I was writing this, I remembered some handmade glass buttons I bought from Penny Faich who was vending next to me at a quilt show last month.  The colors are just perfect so I think this one will have to have buttons.

Well now I'm really pumped about this one.  Time to get going.