Fleece Tamarack
Pattern: Tamarack Jacket by Grainline Studio
Fabric: Polar fleece from Blackbird Fabrics + Kona cotton for binding and pockets
Sewn up: November & December 2020
This jacket was inspired by three things happening within a 24-hour period while I was on a road trip this past October: 1) an afternoon spent marveling at the three-floor Sol LeWitt retrospective at Mass MOCA, 2) the release of 12 colors of polar fleece by Blackbird Fabrics, 3) a late-night hotel hang with my sister where she encouraged me to follow my heart and just make myself a Sol-LeWitt-square-inspired color-blocked fleece jacket already!
Here is some of the art I saw at Mass MOCA:
And here is the sketch I made that night when I learned that so many colors of polar fleece were available to me:
Creating this jacket involved many steps! Here they are:
1. Sketch out my best-case scenario play of colors, then calculate what size rectangles to cut based on the size of the jacket pattern pieces. I wanted my jacket to feel as much like Sol LeWitt’s squares as possible, so I went with rectangles 6.25 inches tall with 1/2 inch extra seam allowance.
2. Cut out rectangles of equal size from all of my colors.
3. Sew rectangles together in the sequences I worked out in my sketch to form 6 bigger rectangles: two for the sleeves, two for the front pieces, two for the back.
Process shot - pinning the pieces together in twos first. My sketch was very helpful in helping me do this in the right order! Also learned the hard way that fleece pile is slightly directional, so had to undo a couple to have the fuzz all facing the same way.
(Plus: Appreciate how pretty the fleece lint looked on my lint roller!)
4. Match each color-blocked rectangle to a piece of red fleece the same size to act as the lining. (Note - I skipped the wool batting called for in the pattern, which was a good call, as two layers of fleece already make for a very warm jacket, and also a very thick jacket that barely fit through my machine.)
5. Quilt! I spent many hours listening to New Girl reruns while running stitches to create all of these little squares (approximately 800, which involves something like 130 lines of stitching!). Note - I didn’t love the journey of getting all these stitches stitched, except at the very end when the squares started to emerge. One fun discovery though was that the fleece’s pile causes the stitch lines to disappear into the fabric. Bonus - you can use any color of thread you want! I went with black on top, + on the bottom, every color of bobbin thread I already had wound because my least favorite part of sewing is winding bobbins, to the point that my sister’s wonderfully thoughtful Hanukkah present to me this year was ten pre-wound bobbins!
I quilted all the bigger pieces to the lining (see peek of red up top) before cutting out the pattern pieces.
6. Cut out the jacket pieces from these pre-quilted rectangles, taking care to align the color blocks the same way you would stripe-match. I did this mostly in a way I was happy with. I ended up needing to add some extra length on the sleeve pieces because I hadn’t thought all the way through how the pattern pieces would sit relative to the colors.
Whoops - to get the stripe match right, I was short on blue at the bottom of the sleeve, and had to add another blue block.
I also sewed but then removed an extra shorter color-block row at the bottom of the back piece, because the colors felt truncated to me, and at odds with my vision of LeWitt-esque squares. I feel like this change was definitely worth the hassle!
Before: Short tail of pink and purple
After: Added extra blue and green.
If I could do it over, I would do the same for the short color blocks at the top of the sleeve pieces, but was a bit trouble-shoot-ed out by that late stage and decided to just Let It Go.
7. Sew everything together! But: how to finish these edges? No serger over here, and fleece seams get very bulky especially where the colors meet. I ended up pre-hong-kong-finishing the edges (i.e. bias bind each pattern piece edge before sewing the pieces together) and then, once joined together, top stitching the seam allowance open. This translated to SEVEN stitch lines per seam! This felt like a lot to me in the moment, especially after so many other seams sewn. But maybe this is just what if feels like to a) quilt, and b) sew something that isn’t a simple boxy top? It did make for a very pretty inside, though, and my sister humors me by saying it looks couture.
Inside shot: Hong kong finish + color block peek = some pretty festive guts!
Closeup of where the side seam meets the armscye seam.
8. Insert snaps. An important lesson learned here is that stretch fleece and snaps do not mix! As I type this, several of my snap bottoms have wriggled themselves free from the tiny holes I punched - as they are no longer tiny on account of fleece’s stretching properties. My plan is to reinforce the bottom snap areas with small pieces of denim and interfacing and re-punch the holes. If anyone out there attempts something similar, I recommend doing this step first, and possibly even reinforcing the entire snap area with something woven before quilting so you can hide it between the two layers.
9. Feel amazing about creating something that you’ve never seen in the world before! And enjoy the windfall of the jacket possessing low-key weighted blanket properties, possibly due to how much thread was involved in getting all those squares and seams together.
And that’s it! It’s quite a warm jacket, and similar to my other Tamarack, makes me feel happy to wear out into the world when everyone else is in black and gray.
~ Photos by Anne Smith - thank you! <3
Drawing process reel: Sewing table photo, pencil sketch, digital drawing.
