Preparing for fulling

Once the jacket was completely released from the weaving form, I measured again. As I expected, there was very little change in the width because I wove carefully to allow for take-up in the weft, but there was quite a bit of difference in the length because the warps had been stretched taut. They bounced back approximately 5% when released. Next I prepared the jacket for fulling.

ENDS: I pulled all the darned-in ends to the back and trimmed them to about an inch long. These will remain inside the jacket as little felted anchors to keep the ends from working out to the front of the fabric.

curved neck edge before and after whip stitching

CURVES: 
I whip-stitched along the pocket openings and neck edge to help stabilize the curves.

POCKETS: 

I herringbone-stitched the two layers of the pocket together along the tops and sides. I left the edges that meet the jacket front and hem loose because these will be combined into the edging which will be woven on after fulling. 

I lightly tacked a layer of plastic between the two layers of the pockets. That way the fabric can shrink but there will be no danger of the pocket felting shut.

SLEEVE JOIN: 

I removed the hemstitching and bias strip that had stabilized the edge of the sleeve opening. Then I pulled up a few threads to even out the weaving. 

The extra warp threads which stopped at the shoulder to provide ease were darned in on the inside of the jacket shoulder. The shoulder easing looks quite effective and the darned-in ends provide a bit of firmness on the shoulder line.

sleeve join before and after stitching

I was disappointed to see that a section of the join at the front and back of each sleeve had big uneven holes. The problem was that the curve at this section of the sleeve was really steep, so there weren't very many warp threads to incorporate into the jacket body. If I had foreseen this, I would have left some weft threads hanging out to use in between these, but instead I turned all the weft threads back into the sleeve, expecting that the warp threads would be enough to form the join. I experimented with extracting some weft threads from the sleeve and weaving them across the gaps, but this was fraught with difficulty and impractical at this late stage of the project, so in the end I used some stitching to fill in the gaps.

Now the jacket is ready for fulling!