Jacket Muslin - Vogue 9064

I recently had a "what on earth should I wear" moment just prior to a job interview.  I woke on the day of the interview to see glorious sunshine streaming in through my window, and my planned outfit was a black wool suit, with knee length boots.  My back-up interview suit is a red wool tweed vintage style suit with a short jacket that has three quarter sleeves, so that got an outing in place of the black.   I figured I'd better sort out a lighter weight outfit and a pair of shoes in case sunshine happened again on an interview day.  So at the weekend I made a foray into the sewing room and dug out a really cute jacket pattern, a vintage Vogue from a batch I got on Ebay a few years ago.  I normally struggle with genuine vintage patterns as I have a very wide back but I must have had my thinking head on, or maybe I was just lucky, cos my first muslin worked out perfectly. 

The ONLY alterations I made to this pattern was to lay the back pattern piece half an inch away from the fold line when I cut it out, and make two new darts.  The original pattern has both shoulder darts and waist darts at the back.  I recently saw an article about neck darts and they are used extensively in my vintage pattern drafting books.  I didn't need the neck or waist to be any bigger, I just needed more reach room in the back shoulder area.  I made my back waist darts a touch larger on each side to take up the amount I had added at centre back, and then put in two neck darts to bring the neck to the right size again.  I must have managed it reasonably accurately as the collar fitted perfectly when I'd finished.   The collar is designed to stand away from the neck slightly at the back and the pattern is supposed to have three buttons on the front.  However, I think I am going to put on only one, very large, button, at the neckline/collar and let the bolero fall open a little as I felt it made the jacket look more current.  I also disliked the point that the turned back cuffs hit on my arms, it was uncomfortable, and the turn backs didn't behave nicely but winged out annoyingly, so I am going to make my jacket with straight sleeves, no turn backs, and a touch shorter than the picture shows.

BUT, wouldn't you know.... there isn't a single suitable bit of fabric in my stash.  All the good stuff is wool, or dark coloured.  Which is a huge pity isn't it?  I shall just HAVE to go to the fabric shop.  Oh dear, she cried (not at all convincingly) whilst she combed the online fabric retailers.   Very, very annoyingly, I did have the perfect fabric, a white stretch cotton twill with a pattern of large blue flowers which for some reason I thought would make great shopping bags.  It appears I felt so strongly about this that I cut an entire large piece of this fabric up into bag pieces... I only made one of the bags.  And yes, I did attempt to find a way to cut the jacket out of the bag pieces.  And no, the sleeves wouldn't go on.  Ah well, there is always more fabric and I'm sure the right thing will be out there.