Sew Confident – Cotton Sateen Zona Jacket

​As a garment sewist, have you ever found yourself flipping through magazines, or walking through a retail store mentally constructing the garments you are seeing? I thought so. We do it, too. We see a shirt and think "I bet I could tweak the Florence Shirt pattern to make that top" or "That top is just like the Eureka Top pattern, if I made these changes". In fact, that is exactly what we did with this Sew Confident! Zona Jacket. We saw a designer jacket we loved and decided to make it using our own Zona Jacket pattern. 

This little green cotton sateen jacket from Lafayette148 New York was the inspiration for our pattern transformation. We love the clean lines and crisp structure of the jacket, set off by the gathered sleeves. The silhouette reminds us of our own Zona Jacket, so we started with that pattern, lengthening the silhouette and widening the sleeves to create a similar look. 

​The Lafayette jacket was made with a green cotton sateen, and we love the luster on the fabric. We decided to use a cotton sateen ourselves and chose a rich teal color. Sewing with cotton sateen can be tricky – that beautiful luster also makes the fabric unforgiving for puckers and creases. But we have a few tricks up our sleeves to help us sew this rich fabric. We have three gorgeous colors of cotton sateen currently in stock – teal, spring green, and a luscious raspberry. 

We included pattern alterations and fabric tips into a Sew Confident! tutorial so that you can make your own Zona Jacket variation. We love to share our ideas on how we manipulate our patterns in hopes that it inspires you to do the same. This Sew Confident! has detailed instructions on lengthening the Zona Jacket, redrafting the sleeves and working with cotton sateen.

All our Sew Confident! tutorials are a PDF. They contain detailed instructions and pictures for each technique – you can see a few sample pages below. This Zona Jacket is from our 2017 Sew Confident! series called Variations with Verve. You can purchase a year's worth of tutorials for only $99.00, or each one is available individually. This is our 6th year of Sew Confident!, and we have built up quite a resource library. Look through our collections and individual tutorials to see what ideas and techniques you want to add to your own sewing library!