Bomber jacket – Burda 11/2004

Hi sewing friends, today I am sharing with you my latest make from Burda magazine. This one is very old…year 2004 to be exact, from my time I went to Dressmaker Collage back in Poland. I had few copies of Burda magazine, so brought them to London with me because there are many projects that I would love to try out. One of them was a Bomber jacket.

I never owned one but I like the casual look and style of this loose jacket and I really wanted to make one to put on when I go for a run or a walk on a cooler mornings.

The pattern

For anyone that is interested the pattern comes from a copy of Burda 11/2004 and it is a model 115. It has a boxy and straight style with a front zipper opening and cut out shoulders and sleeves for a color blocking option as you can see on the photo below. It is recommended for a knit fabrics so I decided to use the leftover of my navy blue stretch velvet material that I made my Dressmaker Ball dress of. I had 150 cm left so it was a perfect amount for this project.

Pattern adjustments

I copied a size 44 and added extra 1 cm to side seams and sleeve seams because my measurements fall outside of the chart for this size then added the usual seam allowance. I like to have 15mm allowance everywhere apart from neckline and armcycle, where I only add 10mm. I always find it more manageable to sew this way.

I have not done any fit adjustments to this pattern, however I changed it a little bit to suit my taste. From the start I knew I wanted a Bomber jacket with contrasting cuffs and hem band. Also I needed to add some big pockets….It is a jacket after all….

First of all I skipped adding seam allowance to sleeve hem because I was adding a cuff so I thought there is no point. Next I cut out 7 cm off from jacket hem..It is a straight seam on sides so did not bother doing it in the middle as there is no defined waistline anyway. I was not sure exactly about the placement of my pockets but I envisioned them slightly slanted with matching zips. I placed the front pattern piece in front of the mirror on my torso and roughly draw a line where I wanted the pocket to be.

Sewing Bomber jacket

I had started to assemble the jacket by sewing the pocket on both front pieces. It was a bit tricky applying interfacing to strengthen the pocket opening seam because the qualities of a velvet material, but with lots of hand basting and patience I managed to do a pretty decent job.

It does not look as neat from the inside as I was not sure how this is exactly done in RTW jackets, so I went with my intuition here but for the first time it is good enough for me. I had learnt a lot and next time will see more improvement I am sure of it 😉

In the process of making a zipper pocket I had learnt how easy it is to shorten a metal zipper. Had to watch couple of videos on that, but it is as simple as ripping unwanted zipper teeth away from a tape.

Once the insertion of pockets was completed I proceeded sewing the jacket in the usual way…but first had an idea of giving a little more of pop of colour and sewn some strips of pink knit folded in half to a shoulder cut out seam at the front. I didn’t have enough of that pink fabric to do the exact color blocking as per sample in the magazine, but too be honest I like it even more like that.

After sewing the main jacket pieces together it came a part of making some cuffs and hem band. I cut two rectangles of pink fabric measuring 12 cm by 20 cm for cuffs, sewn the shorter edges together on each cuff and holding in half attached them to an individual sleeve. Next, I measured a circumference of the jacket hem and took about 80 percent of that number. I wanted my hem band to have some color blocking so had cut two pieces of velvet fabric measuring 12 cm by 12 cm and one piece of pink fabric 12 cm by 75 cm that would become my band. Had sewn two small velvet pieces into both ends of the long pink rectangle first and attached it to my bomber jacket hem in the same way as cuffs.

The final step was sewing the long front zip and attaching a neck binding. This was yet another difficult task, because the velvet fabric kept stretching out. I had to baste it a lot to keep it in place, but still ended up with uneven zip. It is barely visible, but I run out of a zipper on one side hence my neckline is a little bit wonky.

Final thoughts

Overall I really like the final product. I had spent over 5 hours making it and had learnt few things along the way. Next time I would make it a tiny bit shorter and would raise pockets by 5-6 cm. My sleeves could do with being about 3 cm longer too. I omitted sewing the back facing to the neckline because there ware too many layers of the fabric and my machine couldn’t handle it all. I am wondering now if this pattern would work for a woven type material??? Maybe I should test it hihihi

~Do you keep old sewing magazines like me?~

Monika xxx