Brown monster print waistcoat

I made this some months ago, but have been very slow about blogging, as usual. It's a waistcoat made from one of my monster prints from last year! This is the brown version of Monster Pattern 3 on Spoonflower's petal cotton, but it comes in other colours, and is also on MyFabricDesigns, and some things on Redbubble.

I used the same 1770's pattern as my Werther's waistcoat. I got this as part of a fill-a-yard when I was proofing the new designs, and made it take up a large portion of the yard, so there was just barely enough to squeeze a waistcoat front out of it.

I didn't get any photos of the construction of the fronts because I did them on the industrial machine at work and didn't have my camera, but it's much more modern than I usually go with waistcoat construction.

Edit: I found one grainy little photo on my flip phone of the interfaced front before I lined it!

 I used white fusible interfacing along the front edges and bottom portion, and machine sewed and turned the front edges and the pocket flaps. That doesn't make for the nicest edges, so I did a small running stitch along the edge just to hold things in place so the lining doesn't shift to the outside.

I hand stitched the upper edge of the pocket flaps closed, and whipstitched them onto the waistcoat. The pocket bags are sewn in by machine.

I did a quick line of machine stitching around each buttonhole mark, then cut them open and did the buttonhole stitches by hand with dark brown cotton pearl.

The buttons are covered with a cotton print from my stash in a similar dark brown. It's got little leaf/flower motifs on it, which I centered on the buttons. (Link to my covered button tutorial.)

The back is a heavy linen twill from Pure Linen Envy, and the lining is a dark brown cotton bedsheet from the thrift store. The centre back seam is machine sewn with heavy polyester thread and hand felled with linen thread.

I machine sewed a little facing to the back of the neck, and hand stitched it down to the inside with brown silk thread. The side & shoulder seams are machine sewn and hand felled in the same way.

All the linen edges on the unlined back are hemmed by hand with more grey linen thread.

There wasn't enough fabric to even think about pattern matching, but that's ok, the monsters can wander wherever they want.

I'm happy with how it turned out. It's a fairly quick machine sewn project that actually was quick and mostly machine sewn for once!

I really must make more cotton waistcoats for everyday wear. (And more summer linen ones) I wear my wool ones for the colder part of the year, and occasionally a silk one when it's too warm for wool, but I'm always worried about getting them dirty.
A cotton one like this is one I can wear to work without thinking about that.

The monsters next to the original drawings.