Howdy Partner…

There’s almost nothing more American than watching a good ole western film. I remember watching John Wayne movies with my dad on the weekends. From McLintock! to The Alamo to True Grit, I’ve seen them all! So when Riley Blake Designs came out with John Wayne the fabric collection, I was giddy!

This collection has a warm color pallet that includes golden yellows, soft blues, and burgundy reds. This collection of course wouldn’t be complete without a stunning panel of The Duke himself set against a beautiful sunset in a remote desert.

For this project, I took a leap and decided to make a hoodie from this collection. I selected the Quilted Hoodie pattern from Wellspring Designs. Casey’s pattern uses already made & finished quilts to cut and make a hoodie from. But, I had a more…. complicated plan in mind.

I started by importing the PDF pattern into Adobe Illustrator and began designing the hoodie using fabric swatches from the collection. I wanted to use the panel as the entire back of the hoodie. Sounds relatively easy, right? Oh! Did I mention I wanted this hoodie to be reversible? Bring on the complication!

The thing about making a reversible piece of clothing is 1) making sure the fabric orientation is correct as some of these prints are directional and 2) designing how the completed hoodie will look on BOTH sides at the SAME time. Another thing I had to consider was because you would see both sides of this hoodie, all the seams needed to be finished. Which meant I needed to use either binding, French seams or flat felled seams. I used all three!

I primarily used binding on the seams. But because I didn’t want my stitches on one side to show on the opposite, I hand stitched about 90% of my binding. And there was a LOT of binding. I spent about 3 days hand stitching binding! But it was totally worth it.

Once the binding was finally all sewn down, the hoodie was complete. While I don’t usually “toot my own horn” I’m beyond proud of this finished hoodie!

For the hoodie’s “primary” side, I wanted to use the panel for the entire back, which I was able to do for the most part. I had to cut off the John Wayne name on the top of the panel as 1) it was too wide to keep in one piece and 2) I would have had to cut off about 6 inches from the bottom which includes the two horseman. But I still wanted to incorporate the John Wayne name in the hoodie. So I decided to put his name on the arms. This side had pretty minimal hand stitching requirements since all the seams were on the inside of the hoodie. I did have to hand stitch the pocket binding.

The secondary side of the hoodie is where most of the hand stitching needed to be done. Hand stitching was done: all around the hood section, the shoulders, around the arms, the length of the arms, down both sides of the body and around portions of the pocket. That’s right, I included a pocket on BOTH sides of the hoodie. Perfect placement of the pocket was imperative so you wouldn’t see stitching lines on either side. This required hand stitching portions of the pocket itself to the hoodie along with portions of the binding. I was able to avoid using binding on the hood itself by doing a French seam. And I was able to avoid using binding on the seam joining the cuffs to the arms by using flat felled seams. Both of these “advanced seams” were more complicated given the thickness of hoodie sections.

While I should wear a size small, I prefer to wear mediums because I don’t like fitted clothing. But for this hoodie, I made a size Large to 1) accommodate the panel and 2) because there is ZERO stretch to this piece of clothing, I wanted to make sure I didn’t get stuck in the hoodie! Because it’s much larger than me, the sleeves hang down far enough that my entire hand, fingers included, stay inside the sleeve. (Sorry about everything being backwards in the pictures, I used my phones front facing camera so I could ensure I was in the picture frame! Ha!)

In these pictures, you can see the French seam on the hood sticks up a bit. I considered stitching it down to one side but decided to leave it be. I think I’m the only one that notices that anyway! For the binding, when hand stitching it down, I stitched it toward the side it wanted to go naturally. Doing that allowed for a more “normal” or “natural” look I think. Again, I hand stitched portion of the pocket to the hoodie itself along with sections of the pocket binding.

For this project, I only used 9 of the 22 fabrics from the John Wayne collection plus the panel. The detail that went into this collection is just stunning! I highly recommend you check out the John Wayne fabric collection. Maybe you make a hoodie. Or perhaps give a reversible hoodie a try. As the Duke would say, “Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.”