Interlining/Underlining a Jacket

I'm sure it will come as a surprise to absolutely no one that the fall sewing patterns are out and I've started working on one by Gertie. Here is a photo of it that I pulled off of her blog.

To be perfectly honest I think it looks a little dorky buttoned all the way to the top like that, but it would be cute with the top button left undone and it's the perfect jacket for fall weather. 

I was recently gifted significant yardage of a black poly/cotton blend bottom-weight by one of my stepdad's coworkers and I thought it would work well for this jacket. I'm lining it with an anti-static polyester. I wanted some kind of cute print, but I couldn't find one that I liked at Jo-Ann's so I went with my signature shade of blue instead. 

In addition to lining the jacket, I am also underlining or interlining it (I've seen both terms used and I'm not sure if one is more or less correct than the other). 

I've never tried underlining a garment before, but I think it's a neat technique. Basically, you use a second fabric to change the characteristics of your outer fabric. So you can add opacity to a sheer fabric, or add body to a limper fashion fabric. It can also be used to hide stitches when hemming because you just pick up the underlining fabric. In this case, I'm adding flannel to my shell fabric to add warmth without adding significant bulk. 

Sorry, I can't figure out how to rotate the picture. Anyway, here you can see my lining fabric on top, my shell in the middle and the flannel on the bottom.

When you underline a garment you cut your outer fabric pieces, then you cut the exact same pieces out of your underlining fabric and hand baste them together. I maybe could have thrown on my walking foot and sewed them together that way, but you want the grainlines to match and it's easy for fabric to twist on the machine, so I took this as an opportunity to practise using a thimble. 

I've already sewn the underlining to the shell in my photo. The underlining fabric will be completely hidden in the finished garment, so it didn't really matter what color I chose, I picked the blue 1) because I didn't want to risk muddying the color of my lining fabric and 2) because it's easy to see at a glance which fabric is which. The underlining fabric becomes the wrong side, so the contrasting color makes that easy. 

And speaking of wrong sides, if your shell fabric doesn't have a right and wrong side, like mine didn't, you are going to be designating one here, so make sure that you have right and left side pieces, not two rights, or two lefts. 

I've got all my underlining fabric sewn to my shell, so now I'm working on actually sewing the jacket together. From this point on the underlined pieces are treated as normal fabric pieces. Because of the underlining I am having to change the lining too. The original pattern doesn't call for the sleeves being lined, just the body, but flannel doesn't slide well over other fabrics, so I'm adding lining to the sleeves. My next post will be about how I make that change.