Remake of TFA Leia

This weekend I started on the remake of my TFA Leia, of course I want to have it finished before Celebration Europé, but I also would love to have it approved with the Rebel Legion and that usually takes a couple of weeks so I need to finish it pretty soon for that to happen.

The jumpsuit is the first part that I have finished. The most complicated thing with the jumpsuit was to find a good fabric. In London that was my main quest, but I couldn't find anything suitable. I did find a fabric with a good colour at Tyg.se, a jacket fabric in a colour called "ocean". I ordered a swatch and it was definietly the right colour, green in most lights but grey in others. The bad thing is that it's a plastic coated synthetic fabric. It was also quite shiny, but I used the wrong side of the fabric that was duller than the right side. The synthetic means that it's impossible to press and it's also going to be really hot to wear. I will be on the lookout for a natural fibre in the right colour, but for now the colour is perfect and that will do.

I used my old grey jumpsuit as the pattern. I simply cut it up along the seam lines. I chose to cut it, rather than just rip the seams. When I made it I had done quite a few alterations to it, so the seam alloweances were very varied, by cutting along the seams I could add uniform seam allowances all over.

There are a couple of details that we have found out after I made the grey jumpsuit though, and one of them is that Leia's jumpsuit has a yoke. I also decided to incorporate the collar into the yoke, since I couldn't see any seam along the neckline. I've since then discovered that there is a seam, so the collar should probably be a separate piece.

Anyway to create the yoke/collar I did one of my strangest pattern hacks ever. I started off with this pattern for a 16th century partlet.

I tried out the collar shape in some scrap fabric until I was happy with the shape of the turned over collar

 I then cut off the top part of the jumpsuit and layed the partlet and jumpsuit pattern over each other on the fabric.

The yoke/collar is constructed from two layers of fabric, with some light interfacing on the collar part. The back of the collar ended up a bit bubbly, but the lapels look crisp.

Other details that I added was a small pocket (7,5 cm x 12 cm) on the left sleeve and a flap covering the zipper. The flap is simply a piece of fabric folded in half and then both halves turned to each other.

Next stop is to make a new vest.