Making Rose Tyler’s Stolen Earth Jacket- Figuring out the Patterns

It’s been many months since I mentioned that I was working on a scratch-built Rose Tyler’s Stolen Earth jacket. For the most part I’ve been too busy and frustrated to work on the jacket, but this past week I decided it was time to sit down and work on the patterns, cut out the fabric, and possibly finish a majority of the jacket. So far I’ve worked on the patterns, cut out the fabric, and pined the pieces together. XD

Originally I planned on drafting the patterns for the jacket from scratch, but I abandoned that idea for a variety of reasons, mostly to save myself from going crazy with the construction of the jacket. The jacket’s seams are… interesting. Nice to look at, but…. interesting. I never made a jacket or coat with seams like this before so I wanted to base my jacket pattern off an already existing pattern. That way if I made a mistake I could go back to the original pattern and not have to start from scratch.

As a reference, here is a promotional image of the front of the jacket with the seams traced over…

And here’s a screen capture of the back of the jacket with the seams traced over…

I know I missed tracing some seams in the pictures, but I wanted to focus on the torso section of the jacket. The sleeves seams (Which you cannot see in the pictures) are normal, sans the ribbed knit at the bottom, but the torso section of the jacket is kind of odd. I had a lot of trouble finding and modifying the back section of the pattern because, well, I messed up on where the seams are. I actually made an extra seam in the back, but I’ll talk about that later.

Although I had trouble with the seams and turned out “wrong”, I’ll still talk about what I did wrong so if anyone uses my posts to make their own jacket, they’ll know what can go wrong and how to change it. 🙂Like I said before, I used a commercial pattern for this jacket. I used Simplicity 2341 for the jacket, but I also used Simplicity 1940 for guidance making the ribbed knit collar, bottom, and sleeves. I ended up modifying the 2341 pattern a great deal so it would have the the same seams as the Stolen Earth jacket.

Here’s a photo of the modifying progress…

I made a copy of the jacket pattern and then made the modifications on the copy. I’ve known people who modified the real pattern but then couldn’t use it again in the future. Since I don’t like buying patterns over and over again, especially since patterns I tend to like usually go out of print in a year or so, I like to make copies and modify the copies, leaving the original pattern in tact.

To avoid going into a huge amount of details about how I modified the pattern, I decided how long I wanted the jacket to be and cut the pattern that length with seam allowance. After that, I decided how long the ribbed knit at bottom of the jacket would be with seam allowance and cut that much off the jacket. I did not do this on the front piece. Instead, I cut only half of the pattern off because the original jacket has a piece of the leather/outer fabric that goes down the edge of the jacket. You can see it at the bottom of the jacket here…

After I got done modifying the torso patterns, they looked like this laid out side by side…

If you look at the patterns, you can see I added more seams to the back than there are in the Stolen Earth jacket. I didn’t realize this until after I cut out the fabric and pinned it together and began to look at the reference pictures I had. It wasn’t a huge change to the patterns. All I needed to do was tape the “side back” and “side side side back” together and everything would be fine. (I’m not good a naming patterns so most of the pattern pieces are named odd names)

This is what the pattern looks like with the fixed pattern pieces…

I did take a photo of how the back of the jacket looked pinned together with the extra seam in it…

I liked the way the back of the jacket looks with the extra seam in it, but that’s not what I want for this jacket.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve done right now. Next up is actually sewing the jacket together and tweaking the size if necessary.

Before I go, as promised I’ll post a list of links that helped me in my research in this jacket. There are a lot of links, but these are the ones I can still find. I wanted to make a list of links because others might want references for their own jacket or for Rose’s outfit from the episode in general.

Photos of the Jacket Only

• DW Cosplay Livejornal community’s Rose Tyler’s Series 4 break down.
• Polyvore Rose Tyler’s Stolen Earth/Journey’s End outfit
• Photobucket collection of photos from The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End
• Coolspotter’s Rose Tyler and the Oasis Jacket
• Fashion of Doctor Who’s Oasis Jacket post
• Bad Wolf Closet Rose Tyler Season 4 break down