Assymetrical Funnel Neck Jacket

I was getting dressed one morning recently, and as I did so I realised that every morning in winter I get up, put on one of my nice home made shirts - and then promptly cover it up with a boring fleece jacket.  It's just not warm enough in my house in winter to wear just a shirt (even the fleecy, snuggly ones are not quite warm enough by themselves) and whilst I do have some nice knitted jumpers I can wear, I don't always want to wear them for lounging around the house.  Therefore most days I reach for one of my fleece jackets.  My go to jacket is an old purple store bought fleece, but last winter I did make myself two new fleece jackets - a red one and a green and black one  -  the problem is I'm just so bored of wearing the same style over and over and over...

And so I decided it was time for a new jacket.  I started browsing the internet looking for inspiration.  It needed to be warm, but a bit more stylish than a basic zip up fleece.  What I came back to every time was this pattern from Burda Style.   I absolutely love the neckline on this design.    Now my plan is to make this out of some beautiful wool fabric that I had found during one of my recent forays into the fabric store (and then line it with silk) - But I wasn't about to cut into this fabric without testing the pattern first - so I went through my stash and found a couple of pieces of left over fleece - in teal and black - that would go together to make a nice top.

Sizing - as per usual my sizing is all over the place.  BurdaStyle actually have a really good sizing chart with many different dimensions but, as is standard for me, I ranged from a size 36 (around my neck) to a size 50 (upper arms).  My pattern only came in size 36 to 44.  I decided to start simply by cutting out the entire pattern in a size 44 - but also added extra width to some of the main seams allowances to allow for fitting adjustments to be made.

After basting together the size 44, the first thing that was obvious was that the shoulders were way too wide.  So I re-cut all the yoke pieces back to a size 36 to bring the shoulder and neckline back to where they are supposed to be.  Much better.  Unfortunately, I forgot to cut down the front pieces - and so the shirt ended up feeling really wrong around the front.  In order to combat this I re-cut the front pieces at an angle.  The rest of the jacket fit nicely sewn to the size 44.

The sleeves came next - and I'm sure glad I left the extra room on the seams here because they were way too tight - I ended up adding about 3/4" to each forward seam on the two piece sleeve plus about 3/8" to each side of the back seam - adding over 2" to each sleeve before it fitted as I wanted.

The final step was the facing on the front pieces- somehow I managed to cut them incorrectly so they were sewn in back to front.  I ended up just cutting the lining pieces down to about 2.5" wide all around.  To finish the jacket off I hand catch stitched the back and front facings and the hems all around and used a couple of plastic snaps to hold the jacket closed.

Whilst this jacket is fine for wearing around the house it isn't perfect - that bottom snap is creating some real issues for starters - so I wanted to make a second muslin before cutting into the good fabric.  I had a piece of purple knit fleece in my stash so I decided to use that for my next try.

I went back to the pattern to figure out what had gone wrong, and realised my mistake with the front pieces not being cut down to the size 36.  I re-cut all my pattern pieces making sure everything fitted properly with all the other pieces and grading from the 36 at the shoulder to the 44 at the underarms.  I retained my modifications to the arm pattern pieces, but re-cut the sleeve head to fit with the new graded pattern.

Everything went together super simply once this was done and it only took me a couple of hours to finish off the top entirely - again hand stitching all hems and facings.  I also top stitched all the yoke seams using a red thread to really show off those seam details.

I have to say I love the way this turned out.

I'm not sure that I'll wear it fully done up all that often - it does have a tendency to feel like it's trying to choke you, but I really love the way it looks with the front pieces folded back as well.

So now that I have two jackets in this style, I'm not sure my wardrobe can handle a third.  Do I still want to make this pattern in the blue wool?