After separately cutting the pieces for the Rider Vest they undergo a set of pre-production procedures, steaming any wrinkles out of the dense black velvet, carefully ironing the fold-lines into place, leaving the pieces ready for assemblage as soon as the pressed-on interfacing sets in.
Having the principal patterns drawn, the next thing to do is tracing the vest‘s pieces onto cotton, working out a textile base for trying out the new design, applying pins to adjust the fit where necessary, redrawing the seam-lines on the cotton using chalk to eventually copy the correct alterations back onto the patterns.
The original black shirt was my first experiment at elaborate shirt-making and was based upon a regular box-placket shirt-body with side-insets providing a perfectly tailored fit. The in the shoulder and wrist-seams gathered sleeves are tied down in mid-biceps with a fixated ribbon, supplying a slight puffed effect, and are elongated from the wrist onwards by bias-tape trimmed ruffles.
Most notable is perhaps the accompanying circle-cut jabot, by accordio-folds fixated within a strap re-placeable under a secluded layer in the shirt’s collar, and which is like the ruffles, also finished by matching black satin bias-tape.
Finishing a non-standard hemline, like the concave form on the Slanted Jacket works best when it is stitched off with a likewise-cut strip of the same material, having the actual lining sewn to it with a medium backstitch afterwards.
Apart from obtaining the projected hemline, the addition of the facing-strip comes with some extra dexterity, in this particular case enhancing the pelt-ish intent of the bolero-jacket, unfortunately non-adaptable to the basque-like skirt-appendage for the lower-garment-friction it would bring.
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