High on my sewing list this winter has been to knock-off a couple of North Face jackets. I’ve been planning to sew the Denali jacket using Kwik Sew 3813 ever since the pattern came out.  When searching for detailed pictures of the inside of the jacket, I came across photos of the Pseudio Moto jacket.  Oh!  Wow!  I had to make my own

North Face Pseudio Moto Jacket

Here are the pictures of the jacket that I found on the web.  The design is very flattering with the colour blocking and I love the collar.  I was initially planning to use McCalls 7026 the base pattern.  From the front, they look very similar, but the back would take a bit of work to alter.  Flicking through my pattern stash, I came across McCalls 6171.

It had the yoke and princess seams that I was after, just needed some extra length and colour blocking.  This is the roadmap for the design changes. I did a quick mock-up to adjust the fit.  The pattern has A/B, C & D cup sizes so the bodice fit was actually quite quick.  The reviews on PR mentioned that the sleeve didn’t fit well, and looking at it, I knew the armhole and sleeve weren’t going to work.  I grafted in a TNT sleeve pattern, adjusting the armhole and shoulder width to fit.

The fabric is Polartec Powerstretch.  It is great t wear – warm, stretchy and has a DRW treatment.  I’ve sewn with this before and it was a nightmare to overlock.  Instead, all the seams are sewn as a straight stitch and then topstitched to get the seams to lie flat.  Lots of samples to make sure the fabric wasn’t stretched out by the stitching.

My initial draft of the colour blocking on the back turned out to too high, so I had to re-cut the back pieces & yoke.  It was really late at night, past 1am, when I made the decision. The dog was shivering in her bean bag, so I decided to make a dog coat for her out of the failed back assembly

Sewing the pockets was fairly tricky and I had to make it harder by recessing the zippers :-).  The collar looked simple but made the zipper insertion ‘fun’.

All in all, I’m very happy with how this jacket turned out.  It will be great for cross country skiing.

North Face Denali Jacket / Kwik Sew 3813

Sometimes I wonder why it takes me so long to make a pattern.  Am I trying to make it perfect & over thinking it?  I fussed a lot over the fabric choices for this jacket (right from the time this patern first came out).  Here are two originals that I found.  The black one is really nice but I couldn’t quite commit my last piece of black windstopper fabric in case it didn’t turn out.  I’ve used an off-white fleece with my cheap Goretex as the overlay.

The actual sewing was a breeze.  Mostly done watching Contador in a break-away on the first mountain stage of the tour.  After the first jacket, it was bliss to just take the pattern and follow the instructions.  I made a small tweak – and that was to add an extra 1/8″ to each edge on the overlays and collar for turn-of-cloth.  The zipper shield was sewn using both the overlay and fleece – as I didn’t think a single piece with an overlocked edge was a nice finish.

Woot!  The black version is now on the cards as I’ve just found the perfect piece of printed microfibre.