Thrifted Regency: Jacket to Waistcoat

In a stroke of luck, I found an amazing women's jacket for $12 at Lost Eras that I want to turn into a Regency waistcoat for the ball at Lies & Liability.

 

 

I didn't take that many in-progress photos, alas, but I'll share what I did regardless.

 

The first thing I did was seam rip the collar, sleeves, and sides. I didn't cut anything off because I wanted to preserve as much fabric as possible.

I could have taken the front pockets off as well to have it be more period accurate, but I kinda liked the idea of retaining some character of the original, and left them in.

I did a couple of mock ups using Laughing Moon #123 because I had almost no room for error once I started cutting the actual jacket fabric. Luckily, my local sewing store still had a print copy of this pattern in stock, so I didn’t have to faff around with PDF nonsense. The mocks up were extremely basic - just the back and two main front pieces to have a "minimum viable" vest to put on my body and test fit at the shoulder and side seams.

I also erred on the side of keeping it long b/c I hadn’t finished my trousers yet, and knew that Regency trousers have a higher waist, shortening the waistcoat. But I wanted to be able to wear it with more modern fit pants in the meantime. And hemming is relatively easy.

I also made sure my mock up pattern took into account the constraints of the jacket pieces. For example, the pattern has the buttons stop 3/4 of the way up the front and then taper open to reveal the shirt. However, replicating this would have required cutting straight through a button hole, so I ignored that part of the pattern in favor of using the front opening of the jacket as-is. 

Once I was happy with the pattern, I laid my modified pattern onto the jacket fabric and cut it out. I don’t have WIP pics of this stage, sadly, but the shape of the shoulders, arm holes, and sides were pretty different.

The shape of the new collar was different enough I couldn't use the fabric from the original collar, so instead I actually used the sleeve fabric, laid horizontally. I used both sleeves rather than one folded over so I could place a flower on the center back and have the fabric pattern look nice.

Here's my unhemmed vest compared to the pattern preview images.

I used the sleeve cuffs to make the tabs on the back for lacing, which gave me a two pre-sewn seams for free! I sewed them on top of the back piece rather than adding unnecessary complexity by opening up the princess seams.

The pattern also had you inserting metal grommets or sewn eyelets for the lacing, but I couldn’t find my grommet tool for the life of me and didn't feel like doing sewn eyelets, so I opted for fabric loops instead, which I believe there’s evidence of in extant garments (though don't quote me on that), and look perfectly fine in my opinion.

Rather than cutting a new lining, I just re-purposed my final mock-up. Huzzah for reducing fabric waste!

I actually ended up wearing this vest to a fantasy masquerade ball before I had finished my breeches, so I just did a quick fell-stitch hem that would be easy to undo if I needed to shorten the vest later.

And here's what the final vest looked like on!

I'm extremely pleased with how this project turned out. I'm also glad I chose to keep the original pockets rather than replacing them with something more regency appropriate. This is just my personal taste, but I really like the story of things being visible, and that detail reveals the original life of this piece of clothing in a way that I find cool and satisfying.

If thift-flipping waistcoats is of interest to you, I highly recommend Bernadette Banner's YouTube video on turning a men's modern vest into a women's Victorian-style waistcoat. It's not Regency, but it does have some cross-applicable tips!