single welt pocket: SUCCESS!!

YES! this makes two of the hugest parts of this vest that i now believe i can actually do. i'm not posting about it because i don't know exactly how the collar/lapel part will work in the end, exactly, but i did successfully sew a notched collar yesterday. thank gawd for brigham young! they did not, unfortunately, have a tutorial vid for me on a single welt pocket, though. double-welt (found lots of instruction on that, i'm not sure why the single is so much less common) but my pattern is for a single welt. i did, however, come across a wonderfully illustrated step-by-step here. i made my through it quite well, and it gave me the basic understanding of the construction i needed to go back to the pattern. and look look look!

oh - so, obviously, this is just a test run and these are not the real fabrics. i got the grey so that we could get a sense of what it would actually look like, but it's just turned into a total testing ground anyway, there won't be anything to try on with this fabric. and the white was so i could really see what the different pieces were supposed to be doing.

check it out - a pocket in the middle of the dart - successfully!

a close up. here you can see the things that are off: the seam line at the top is kinda angled, so you can see the white underneath on one side. on the real vest, the white fabric will be the same as the vest, so stuff like that wouldn't show as much. but i'll be working on perfecting the seam, anyway. also, at the lower right corner, you can kind of see how the fabric is pinched up. i overlapped some seams where i shouldn't have (the very thing that is the key to the notched collar, by the way). because of the notched collar experiment, i know how to avoid that in the future.

see? it really opens up and everything!

see how the back of the pocket matches the front of the vest perfectly, so there's no visual disruption when the pocket is opened? yay! oh man, i'm so happy about this.