Lone Star Jacket

Quilt Coats are quite the trend right now, even beyond the quilting world.  I don't normally care about fashion trends, but I do like the idea of a quilted coat or jacket.  Problem is, I have zero garment-making skills.  I have tried and the results have not been good.  I have wondered if I could go the sweatshirt-turned-into-a-quilted-jacket route, and have watched this tutorial with Edyta Sitar several times for the method.  When I learned that one of the Island Batik challenges was the Lone Star, I thought a lot about making a quilted jacket using a sweatshirt for the challenge since a Lone Star would look fabulous on the back of a jacket.  Ultimately, I decided it was too risky and moved on to design a Lone Star quilt.

But I couldn't get the idea of a Lone Star on the back of a jacket out of my head. Jordan Fabrics has a tutorial for a smaller Lone Star, and I thought if I made the strips narrower, the Lone Star might be small enough to fit on my back.  So once I had chosen my fabrics for Crayola Explosion, I looked at the fabrics I hadn't used and tried to find a combination of 5 fabrics that I liked.  I ended up repeating two fabrics.  I decided to applique the star to the back of a denim jacket.  My biggest problem was that I really didn't want raw edges.  I bought some skinny pre-made bias binding and used that to encase the edges.  That worked well.

My plan is to keep this jacket at work so I have something to throw on when I'm cold.  With the variety of colors, I figure I can wear it with anything.  The fabrics are Island Batik, of course, from the Chickadee collection, and I did use Aurifil thread and Schmetz needles.  I've worn it at work a few times now and gotten many comments on it.  I'm pretty happy with it, and I love that I can kind of hop on the Quilt Coat bandwagon without needing to make the garment!  

 

If you like the Chickadee fabrics, I have a giveaway on this post until December 23rd to win a set of 2 1/2" strips from the collection--it's not a full jelly roll, just one each of 18 fabrics from the collection, but there are lots of bright colors.