I am City Girl

And I love my city.

James Mason and I decided it would be a nice day for a more special photo shoot than my normal driveway shots so we headed downtown to a beautiful parkway resurected from an abandoned railway bed.

How did she get up there in those shoes?

I got a little dirt on the coat scampering up onto a dirty ledge.

An extension of the parkway still under construction.

A beautiful day, only slightly too hot for a jacket.

The fabric collage on this coat is an homage to both the architecture here and the abundant, beautiful art on it. Graffiti is an art!!!

Do you recognize the locale of the photos? Or the buildings represented on the coat?

I used one of my TNT patterns for the coat: Burda 7638. It looks like a real dog on the envelope, but I see it as a blank canvas. The collage fabrics are the ones I showed in the post. I laid this out in adobe illustrator using a jpeg of the fabric as a fill to kind of get and idea of what I wanted. I then created a black and white line drawing of the file and used it to trace out the shapes on wonder under.

The design evolved a bit as I worked on it. I ended up not using all the fabrics. After I fused everything down, I stitched all over it with gold thread using my cover stitch machine. I hated how it looked, so I picked it all out. Only took me 6 hours or so!!

I then decided to do free motion stitching on it with black thread. I am a newbie to that art. It was not easy. Somehow, I wasn't getting the free motion part of free motion. I consulted with  DIII and you tube. A pair of gardening gloves and some silicon spray got everything moving along smoothly! The stitching was a lot of fun and only took one evening.

I finished it with these excellent welts for the pockets.

Sorry for the dirt!

I lied, its not finished. No closure yet. I'm leaning toward snaps, but I have until fall to figure that out.

I really, really, really enjoyed the whole process of making this jacket!

(The top I'm wearing is the Textile Studio Monaco shell and the skirt....well, the skirt is part of The Big Skirt Project. I'll tell you about it later.)

Finally, a big fireworks and loud explosions welcome to all my new followers, and to Rhonda. I am so flattered by all your lovely comments.