I’ve been trying to gather the courage to make the Ziggi Moto Jacket by StyleArc for a couple months now. The pattern is just my style but… there are SO MANY PIECES. There are 23 (!) pattern pieces, most of which you are cutting 2 of. Basically there are about 50 pieces to sew together. I had fabric set aside that I bought at Colorado Fabrics at the end of last year, I cut the pattern out in February, and then… it just sat there. Until a couple weeks ago when I found out that Sew Maris is doing a Ziggi Jacket sew-along, which was just the spark I needed to get off my butt and just do it. As an aside, I don’t do many sew-alongs because they are mostly targeted towards beginners, so I am so happy that someone is doing a sew-along involving some more advanced techniques. I really need help putting those pocket and sleeve zippers in!

Here’s a swatch of the fabric I had my heart set on. It’s kind of a indigo color and has these wavy burnout stripes. It’s pretty thin, but somewhat stiff. It’s still not stiff enough to hold up to this jacket style so I decided to underline it with this peach/blush colored twill weave polyester. This means I’ll have to cut out another 20-something pieces of underlining… what am I thinking?!

For the quilted pieces on the shoulders my initial plan was to overlap pieces of the striped fabric with the stripes perpendicular to give it a criss-cross look. However when I played around with it you couldn’t really see the fabric underneath and it ended up looking mostly solid indigo. So I tried quilting with just one layer over the underlining. Here’s some samples with navy thread and with peach thread matching the underlining. You can’t really see the thread in the navy one, so I thinking I’m going to go with the peach. Is it too much? I might choose a slightly darker peach to match what the color looks like showing through the top layer instead of matching the underlining exactly.

I ordered zippers last week from Zipperstop. You can check a box to have them cut to the exact length you need for $1 extra per zipper. Since all 5 zippers I needed were not standard lengths, I was grateful to have them do it for me. And I couldn’t believe how fast they showed up! I ordered on a Wednesday and they showed up in my mailbox on Saturday. Pretty amazing for a custom zipper.

Even after all this planning, I still wasn’t quite sold on my fabric choice. Probably because I know this will take awhile to sew up and I’m scared I won’t like it. So I did a little photoshopping on the line drawing to fill in a scan of my fabric swatch and do some planning on how I’ll align the stripes. Here it is…

Okay, I’m sold on it now. What you think? Give me a kick in the butt!