I might have gone a bit crazy with online fabric shopping when the cool weather began. What is it with fabric that sucks us sewists in? During a frenzied moment, I splashed out on some boiled wool from Minerva’s Bower in the Blue Mountains. Did I know what boiled wool was? Um, nope. Did that matter during a frenzy? Nope. Because I read that boiled wool has an amazing feature…. It doesn’t fray! (!!!!!!!!!) Just cut it. No need for hemming or binding. Like wow! So what better material to use for warm but bulky Winter items?
Well, I now have an insight or two into said boiled wool. First, it shrinks. I had ordered 1m x 1.4 width of (expensive) rust-coloured wool to make a Tessuti Amara vest, as well as 2m x 1.4 width of (expensive) cornflour blue wool to make an I Am Mimosa cape. The fabric arrived and promptly shrank in the inaugural wash to .86m x 1.11 and 1.5m x 1.66 respectively. Piddlesticks! What to do?
Luckily I already had the Pauline Alice Ayora jacket in my stash. (I hoard patterns even more than fabric). It has sleeves, mega-large pockets, wide binding, and a quilted layer between 2 other layers that make the jacket reversible. Does that sound like a lot of work to you? What was I thinking when I downloaded this pattern? But it now solved the problem of putting my shrunken rust-coloured wool to use. That is, my no-fraying boiled wool. There would be no need to bind anything! (Moohaha.) I could just cut the body out in one fell swoop and voila, I’d end up with a vest – just not the Amara one. I don’t know how much length I added to the vest but it’s not as much as in the photo below because I cut some of the bottom off to use for patch pockets. (That’s patch pockets with no hemming, by the way.)
Being bulky and fray-free, I pinned the shoulder seams by overlapping them instead of the usual right-sides-together method. I would later sew 2 lines there about a centimetre apart. I also placed some buttons to see how they looked but decided they were too masculine. I shortened the length and cut some pockets. Things were coming together very quickly….
…Until I tried it on. This brings me to my second insight into boiled wool. It’s too scratchy! Who’d have thought, for the price of it? What do others do with it? Clearly it needed to be lined with a material that had some thickness of its own so into The Stash I went for some cheap corduroy from Spotlight. I purposely cut the corduroy to be narrower than the wool so that it didn’t finish flush with it. I finished the corduroy with the overlocker and then attached it to one side of the wool. Then I sewed the shoulder seams using my walking foot, since the fabric was bulky (2 wool and 2 corduroy layers).
Second try-on, still no banana. When I moved my head to the side, the wool neckline scratched my neck and face. But I wasn’t to be thwarted! The thing that I’d been trying my best to avoid – the thing that had lulled me into boiled wool in the first place – just had to be done. But damnit, I wasn’t going to spend time cutting out wide binding. I already had some 3cm (?) wide bias tape in The Stash so out it came. The binding doesn’t catch all of the corduroy on the inside (because I’d intentionally cut that to not sit flush with the edge) but nobody sees that when it’s on. It’s also not my neatest binding, that’s for sure, but since my 2-minute make had turned into 2 hours, I couldn’t care less by that stage.
Third try-on, hooray! A vest at last, and a warm one at that. I added a little loop and button (not in photos). I like it enough, with its rustic, Himalayan / Andean vibe. Here I am modelling it with my trusty ugg boots on a Winter’s day in Brisbane.
Great story. Challenging journey. I’m sure it’s toasty, especially with ugg boots.
Yes, plenty toasty. I imagine the full Ayora jacket (with quilting) would be like wearing a doona.