Burda Style For people who sew

The professional way to resize a jacket is to take the jacket’s measurements and your own, then divide the difference by the number of seams you are going to use to reduce the size with. In the case of this jacket I had six seams, so say I wanted to lose one inch I could reduce each seam by 1/6”. However, that’s not how I did it. I knew I wanted to shape the waist more than the upper body, because my shoulders are a size 12 and my waist a 10. I also wanted extra room in the shoulders and leave the sleeve length untouched because I want to use this jacket for cycling into town. I decided to lose more from the side and back seams than from the bust seam, which I simply wanted to shape to better suit my measurements, than to reduce the size with. There were also the pockets which are positioned over the bust seam and I did not want to have to remove and re-attach them. I did not need to reduce the size by that much to make the jacket fit better, so taking slightly more off the side and back seams was not going to ‘unbalance’ the jacket.