Green Berlin

Tessuti released their Berlin Jacket a while ago, and I remember liking it when it came out but I couldn’t really see myself wearing it. Then I kept seeing Ruby’s awesome versons, and I started to re-think…I mean, I live in my Driftless Cardigans, and I was thinking of making a Blackwood Cardi in a hefty merino knit anyway…suddenly the Berlin seemed like a great option for in-between a cardigan and a coat. So when I saw this dark green boiled wool on the Drapers website I bought it and the pattern and got working on it!

This pattern was great to sew, and it came together so quickly! I think it went from cutting out to completed in less than 3 hours. The pattern has you overlap the raw edges and then topstitch the pieces together, so there is a raw edge on the outside of each seam. I definitely struggled to get those seams looking nice and even, and the boiled wool made it super hard to unpick, so after a couple of goes I decided that close enough was good enough! It passes the 3ft test, so I’m happy enough. The side seams and sleeve seams are just sewn wrong sides together as usual, which let me take a good 2” out of the sleeve width at the cuff to slim down the arms a bit.

I changed up a couple of things as I was sewing, I had seen a RTW garment similar to the Berlin that had a really clean finish around the neck/front edge, so I wanted to copy that. I sewed the neck facing wrong sides together, and then under stitched it and turned and hand stitched it to the wrong side. I did the same for the sleeve cuffs as well, but I flipped them to the outside to keep the turn-up look. I’ve been folding the cuffs back a second time to get a bracelet length sleeve, but its good to know I can turn them down when it gets really cold. I’m really happy with the way both changes turned out!

Boiled wool is so warm! I’ve had a tonne of wear out of this jacket already, its been so useful for these kinda random late autumn days we’ve been having. It was a really good layer to take down to Wanaka last weekend for a wedding we were invited to, it was significantly colder down there but this kept me toasty!

I love the length of this one, but next time I’ll lift the pockets up a bit, I can’t touch the bottoms of these ones! If it wasn’t such a pain to unpick this fabric I would move these ones, but I’ll just deal with it… I am thinking about making a hip length version out of some pale pink boiled wool I saw at The Fabric Store, but maybe I’ll wait until spring for that! So many things to make, so little time…

Zelda approves!