RIP Textile King

I had a genuine feeling of deja vu today.

In September 2010 I reported the closure of Soho Silks, a fabric shop I used to visit quite a lot. It was secretly there that I found the rolls of genuine Blue Tennant Suit fabric hidden away in their basement.

Well today I was in town, and discovered the closure of not one, but TWO further establishments I used to frequent – one a great loss the other a deserved closure. But more of that later.

Textile King

This was not the most pretty of shops from the outside, but it hid a treasure trove of suiting and tailoring materials which I found myself returning to again and again.

The brown fabric I used for Ian Cummin’s Frock Coat (see left), as well as another I did him in a navy blue were sourced here.

More recently I found it was the perfect place to get the buttons for my Matt Smith Shetland Tweed Jacket, and had reason to believe it could we have been the original source for these.

I was told on more than one occasion that Ray Holman, the costume designer for series five, had frequented there and bought the material for Captain Jack’s shirts when he worked on Torchwood.

The proprietor had been shown a sneaky preview of the Matt Smith costume well before it was launched and I gather at one point even Russell T Davis had been a visitor when he was Executive Producer!

So the shop does have a bit of a special place in the Doctor Who lore.

Ultimate Tennant Suit - cutting phase two

The Phase One of the cutting gave me the fabric to circumvent the body of the jacket, as well as all I needed for the external pockets (see right).

Everything went well, so it’s time to return to the cutting bench and prepare some more pieces for assembly.

Pair 2 -
Size 34 x 34

I am cutting the sleeves for the suit now, and its a pretty forgone conclusion that the lower sleeves will be cut from the fronts of the trousers due to their width at the shoulder (see left, top); and the upper sleeves are cut from the backs (see left, below).

I need to angle the sleeves such that the top parts are on grain, and the forearms are a little bit across the grain. when I get to the assembly of the sleeves I’ll show why I have done this.

I have positioned the upper sleeves as low as possible, leaving me a decent piece of off-cut.

When I first cut fabric from the GAP trousers, I had quickly realised that I would not get fabric wide enough to cut the collar in a single piece. I concluded that the screen used suit must have a join at the back of the neck, so I will use this piece of left over to cut my collar.
I cut this just before I needed to set it, to make sure I cut it to fit correctly.

Pair 1 -
Size 34 x 30

I’ve returned to the pair that gave me the back of the jacket to cut the lapel facings.



While I’m on the cutting bench and have the pattern pieces to hand, I also cut what I need for the lining.

Most a straight repeats of the body of the jacket, but with a little adjustment to allow for movement and capacity inside the jacket.

The backs are cut with the vent allowance (see above); and a special panel is shaped and cut to cover the front panel, minus the lapel facing.

This is pretty much everything I need now to complete the Ultimate Tennant Suit!

Ultimate Tennant Suit - cutting phase one

This past weekend marked the start of cutting the GAP fabric for the Ultimate Tenannt Suit I am making.

I have been planning this for a while, and at long last the day has finally come   :)

So far I have harvested fabric from three of the pairs trousers:
Pair 1 (Size 34 x 30);
Pair 3 (Size 36 x 34); and
Pair 6 (Size 33 x 32).

This will be enough to get the body of the jacket made, including all the pieces for the pockets and more than enough to get me started.

It’s gonna be funny looking at the finished jacket and know that that was a back of a leg and that was a front!

I think it will change my view-point on the suit next time I see an episode – which will be interesting!

It’s fascinating to see the reality of how they are cut, so here is a breakdown of how the pairs were dissected and what parts of the jacket they each provided. 

Pair 1 -
Size 34 x 30

I choose the waist 34s pair to cut the back panels as they just fit, leaving minimal waste.
What is left over still doesn’t entirely go to waste, as I then used it to cut the breast pocket flap and the back strap.

Pair 3 -
Size 36 x 34

The front panels of these trousers are the widest pieces of fabric I have, which is just as well since they need to cover from the lapel edge to the apex of the shoulder.

The small area of waste at the top gives me enough to make the facings of the outer pockets (the piece you see at the back of the pocket when you look inside it).

Pair 6 -
Size 33 x 32

finally I need to cut the side panels, so to preserve as much of the fabric as possible, I have dropped to the narrowest waist I have.

From these I have used the fronts of the trousers are the narrower of the harvested panels available.
I can still happily get the panel I want out of here, leaving a decent chunk of waste from where I cut the breast pocket and most of the pieces I need for the outer pocket flaps.

This completes the cutting I need for the body of the jacket, meaning work can start in earnest . . .

iPad stitching

Now I have finished the calico test for the suit I am making, I thought I’d take a brief break and show you some of the new techniques I have used in making it.

I have been slowly drifting away from “home-sewing” and steering towards more professional, traditional techniques. The test I have made (see right) contains absolutely no fusible interfacing. Instead it uses a variety of non-fusible stiffening materials, much more appropriate for a suit of this nature.

To learn the use of these I made a half-scale sampler of a tailored jacket during the autumn term at college, using a very helpful text book for guidance (see left). Doing the jacket in half-scale speeds up the process and makes it a handy reference piece. Only one side is made – since it is a mirror of the other – and by not closing it off completely, it will allow for inspection so it can be an on-going reminder of how it was made.
A sampler like this can become as involved as you like, with outer and breast pockets, linings and inside pockets – but I’m concentrating on the collar and lapel construction so will limit myself to this – I won’t even be setting a sleeve.

While working on numerous projects, you inevitably accumulate left over fabrics or buy materials with good intentions that never get used. This happened with some moleskin I bought years back (pre-dating my blogs), planning to make my then MkII Tennant Coat with it. Before work could start, I found the Malabar, which I still use today. The moleskin went to stock, but I did then try to use it to make an Inverness Cape, but that proved to be a very unsatisfactory exercise.

More recently, while sourcing potential fabrics for my Six Coat, I bought some green baize from a John Lewis remnants box (see right). Sadly it wasn’t a match, but luckily it was only a metre at most, and I only paid half-price for it, so I put it done to experience.
Again this went into stock, and today it bounces back out, this time to make my jacket sampler.

Here are my notes from making the sampler late last year

My tutor has given me a basic jacket pattern to use, which I cut it from my fabric. 

Next thing I need to do is cut my own pattern for the interfacings, based on this supplied pattern and covering the areas that need support.

This covers the shoulder area of the back, sweeping down under the armhole to give support to where the sleeve joins; and on the front, covers the upper chest, the front edge of the jacket, and again under the armhole.

The intention here is to use zero fusible interfacings which are principally hand-stitched in place, and made from traditional non-fusible, woven cotton and horsehair (see left).

It is fairly stiff (to give the support I need), but flexible with a springy quality (which bounces back during wear) ideal for this use. Being woven it has a grain, which I need to cut to match the grain of the body.

In both sets of pictures are: left, jacket pattern with interface pattern laid on top; centre, the cut body of the jacket with woven cotton/hair interfacing in place; right, turned right-side, the interfacing is tacked in place.

Ultimate Tennant Suit -lining the calico test

So far I have cut the Pattern for the body of the Tennant Suit, this time with allowance for the limited fabric available when I cut the GAP trousers (see right).
There was a lot to think about, but I got there in the end.

Next up is doing the sleeves.

First I draw a block for the sleeve based on the measurements I need (see below, left).

From this I have traced off the two parts, smoothing the corners at the elbow, and adding a cuff allowance (see below, centre).

Finally this get traced off onto tissue paper, adding seam allowances as I go (see above, right).

Once I’ve cut what I need from calico, it’s then a simple process to make the sleeves up and set them in the jacket (see right).

NB:
Don’t forget that at the moment the hem isn’t turned up, so it looks a little long.

Ultimate Tennant Suit - new calico test

Now before I start cutting any of the precious GAP fabric, I need to be 100% certain on the pattern I am using, therefore I an going to make a new calico test jacket.

I have previously done such a test (see left) but I do need to make some serious revisions due to one major restraint I am now faced with that I didn’t have to worry about back then.

The first thing I have to do is re-draft the basic block from which my pattern will be drawn (see below).

It is while I am tracing off my pattern pieces that something struck me, which means I need to stop and think carefully.

Although I have a good range of sizes of trousers to use, ranging from a couple of waist 33s up to the biggest at waist 36, I have realised that even these will not cover the pattern shape for the front panels – well not in the same way I cut them last time around.

Ultimate Tennant Suit - time to get picky

As you may have read, I am about to make the Ultimate Tennant Suit, using half a dozen pairs of the original GAP trousers.

But before I can start any pattern cutting proper, I need to harvest the usable pieces of fabric from the trousers, so I can see what I have to work with.

To start with I tried unpicking the stitching of the legs, but quickly found that the seams are double-stitched for strength, so don’t come apart that easily. The edges of the fabric is also overlocked to stop the edges fraying, so even if I could remove all the stitching, it would leave the edges unusable as they will be peppered with holes.

I then found that by cutting the seams along the outside of the stitch-line, they easy come apart.

At the tops of the trousers there really is little point trying to rescue anything above the back pockets. There is nothing on the suit that I could make from fabric that small in size, so I cut across the tops of the leg as close to the pockets as I possibly can (see above).

I then do the same around the fronts between the fly and the side pockets (see left).

Ultimate Tennant Suit - doing it for real

This week I start work on the most fascinating, incredible and AWESOME project I have undertaken so far – making a Tennant Suit jacket.

Now, this wont’t be just any jacket – this will be the ULTIMATE jacket. Why? Well, because I am working from SIX PAIRS OF ORIGINAL GAP TROUSERS!

For those that don’t know, it was revealed in the pages of Doctor Who: The Inside Story, that the original brown suit had been inspired by a pair of trousers David Tennant took a shine to. There was no matching jacket to make it a suit, so Lousie Page bought as many pairs of the trousers as she could find and took them apart to then use to make a jacket!

You can read further about this in my entry, Revelation Of The Trousers.

What Lousie didn’t say was where the trousers had come from, but after a chance find in a charity shop, it was discovered that they had come from GAP!

Since then, three have been various attempts to match and re-weave the fabric used, however, what has never been tried is to get the right trousers and repeat the technique that had been employed to make the real deal – until now !

Interfaced on the inside

Today I start making my burgundy pinstripe Tennant Suit jacket. Now I KNOW it’s not a screen accurate colour - don’t write in! - I’m only doing it as a dry run before cutting into a single inch of my blue fabric.

I have dyed the blue fabric to the right colour, so have dyed some red pinstriped fabric (from the same source as the blue) to a burgundy so I am comparing like-for-like material (see below).

Having started (but not finished) a similar jacket earlier in the year, and a Calico Test only a couple of weeks ago, making it up should be relatively easy and quick.


Before I can do any cutting I need to stiffen the fabric. It is, in reality, a shirting fabric, so quite a lightweight cotton. I did initally wonder if I had found the right material, but a friend pointed out that there was a publicity still where you could see the inside of the trouser ankle - and it was white, which had puzzled him (see below). This made perfect sense to me - it had been interfaced! What I needed to work out was how stiff I needed to make it.

In the UK we have a main manufacteurer for interfacing, Vilene. Their basic range is a Light-weight, a Medium-weight and a Heavy-weight version. This determines the thickness. Each then comes in either a Standard or Ultrasoft option. This controls it’s flexibility.

Since the fronts of jackets are usually interfaced, I am going for a Medium Stanard for the body, but I want the sleeves to be more supple, so I will use a Medium Ultrasoft for the arms.

Usually you would cut the fabric then cut matching shaped interfacing and press them together. But since I need to interface everything I am going to press it first, then cut the pre-interfaced pieces after.

Annoyingly the fabric and the interfacing come in different widths, so I do a strip of the fabric and save the off-cut for later.
These off-cuts, once interfaced with the Ultrasoft, will be fine for the sleeves, so nothings really going to waste.

Suit of a different colour

So - I am gearing up to finalising the pattern for my Tennant Suit’s jacket, and yet again I am in the annoying position where I have the perfect material to use, but only a very limited supply with no chance of replenishment!
Urrgghhhhh!


Some readers may remember the mad scrabble for the JoAnn Brown Pinstripe Fabric a couple of years back, when it was discovered after it had been discontinued and only short end rolls remained in a handful of stores scattered across the US.

This time I have a few metres of the Blue Pinstripe Fabric, which I am still 99.99% sure is the material used to make he original suits.

But although I have cut a very respectable pattern for my jacket (see above), I want to produce a dry run on similar fabric before cutting a single inch of my precious blue material.

A recent thread on the forums entitled “Which is better? Brown suit or Blue????” got people talking about which suit they preferred: the brown or the blue.
One poster, jjlehay, bucked the trend by letting his mind wander onto what other suits The Doctor may have worn if he had remained for further seasons.

Blue suit fabric - dyeing

After the excitement of finding what I believe is the fabric used to make the blue suit, I now need to work out how to over-dye it to match it to the screen-used fabric.

I am using a standard machine washing Dylon dye, in the same way I did when I needed to dye the pillow ticking for the Six Trousers I made earlier this year.

First thing you do is put 500g of table salt in the drum of the washing machine (see below, left), before adding the dye (see below, centre). I then adds the fabric (see below, right), put the machine on for a 40 degree wash and cross my fingers!!!



It took me a few attempts to get it to a colour I was happy with. Here are the stages I went though:

ORigiNaL FABRiC

This is the un-dyed fabric to see how it started out.

Version 1 - too electric

My first attempt used a mid-colour blue dye, which although it gave a good result, and toned down the bright red pinstripes to somewhere near the correct shade of dark red.

However, it is a bit too electric and vibrant.

Version 2 - far too dark

The next thing I tried was to move to a different shade of blue, tis time using a dye akin to blue denim.

However, this come out shockingly dark, and the pinstripes are almost completely lost. You can just see them in the inset, if you click to enlarge.

Version 3 - on to something

Having failed dismally with the latest attempt, I returned to the colour I used for the first version.
Looking at it I realised that although it was too vivid, it was the right colour, but needed to be toned down. I could do this by using less dye or more fabric, but this would make the resulting colour lighter, and that is not what is needed.

Blue suit fabric - discovery

Now I am back working on my Tennant Suit, a series of happy coincidences arrived at an amazing discovery.

I had recently finished a pair of Season 19 Five Trousers for a client, and with a lot of uncertainly over postal strikes in the UK, I was reluctant to post them to him fearing they may become part of the mountains of undelivered mail that have been collecting in sorting depots over the preceding few weeks.
Luckily my client only lived the other side of London, and given he had an interest in the fabric sellers based in Soho, we decided the best thing to do was meet up for a joint trip around the shops and to hand over the trousers in person.
Irritatingly a combination of freelance work placements and my need to attend college in Hemel Hempstead prevented us from meet as soon as we had hoped, so credit must go to my client’s patience while we waited for a mutually convenient day to happen, and today (16th October) was finally that day!

We meet just after lunch in a Starbucks on Wardour Street and had a good chat about Who costumes before setting out on our tour.
First stop was Kliens (see left), where I needed some 4-Part Hook and Eye Trouser Fastenings for another pair of Five Trousers I was working on.

Kliens is a great little shop for hard to find professional quality haberdashery.
One range they do have which I find an inspiration for a future project is of frog fastenings (see right), like those used on Jon Pertwee’s smoking jackets and Inverness Capes. (see right, inset)
Knowing I have a reliable source of these makes creating these garments all the more tempting, and as you may have read, I plan to do so in my Tailoring Class in the near future.

We carried on our journey, taking in a number of shops, with a shortlist of fabrics we wanted to try and track down, such as the houndstooth check used for Tom Baker’s waistcoat (see below, left); various velvets and tartans for Jon Pertwee’s costume (see below, centre); we well as the elusive beige fabric for the Five Coat I am also working on right now (see below, right).

Spoonflower

Spoonflower.com is a great little website!

In a nutshell it gives you the ability to have printed bespoke fabric to your own design, and then order as little of as much as you need.

Whereas most fabric manufactures require exorbitant set-up fees and minimum runs enough to cloth an army, Spoonflower has none of this (assuming you can design and create your own patterns), and the cost of fabric really isn’t that much, considering.

Spoonflower are based in a former sock mill in downtown Mebane, North Carolina USA and were formed in early 2008 by Stephen & Kim Fraser, who spotted a gap in the market for bespoke fabric printing.

Luckily Stephen (a self-confessed internet geek) used to be the marketing guy for another North Carolina company called lulu.com, who were doing print-on-demand book publishing. It wasn’t a massive leap to move to print-on-demand fabrics, and before long they were up and running.

Spoonflower, in case you wondered, is an endangered plant native to North Carolina that grows around the edges of bogs.

Making Phoenix fabric

I was going to call this entry: “Well that’s annoying!”, but luckily I pulled things back from defeat.

Things haven’t gone as planned this week.

I previously posted that I am making a pair of Six trousers before doing the ones for the suit, so I can get some practice in.

From the Six Breakdown on dw_cosplay I had found and ordered some of the Yellow Ticking (see left) from Interior Mall.
Their website says they ship worldwide, but do not quote shipping prices, asking you to enquire direct for a quote.
When I got a reply I found their shipping costs to the UK were very over priced at US$58 for sending just 4 yards of fabric (value US$70).
Luckily I have a friend in San Diego who had something to send me and he agreed to take delivery of the fabric and add it to the shipment before dispatching it to me.
This simplified things, and I can’t thank him enough for making that happen.

Before forwarding it on to me my friend thought the material was not quite right, saying his recollection of Colin Baker’s trousers was that they had a single stripe. I had always thought this as well, but had found that the trousers he wore for his first season were actually a triple stripe: two narrow ones either side of a thicker one. A nice clear image of this can be seen on DoctorWhoProps.com (see below). The Interior Mall fabric looked to be a good match.

He also thought the colour was a little off, but I’d have to see that to know what he meant.

The packaged arrived this week, and to my horror I saw exactly what he meant.
It was totally the wrong colour! Instead of being a vibrant yellow it was a light oatmeal instead, and looked to be a match to another colour on their site, the swatch for which can be seen here (right).

This was really annoying – thanks Ray (who cut and packed it according to the attached ticket). Pillow ticking, as this fabric is known, is relatively commonplace, and I had found several suppliers in the UK (Tinsmiths had a good range) though they did not have the right yellow with black stripes. So I had only gone to Interior Mall for the colour!

So all that effort was effectively for nothing.
Urrggghhhhh*@!

Revelation Of The Trousers

Sometimes you can spend too long looking at something and get too close to it and miss the bigger picture.

Every now and then, to avoid this, I take a step back and reset to the very start of things, just to check I am not missing some obvious.

Call it re-evaluation with hindsight.

One of these landmarks for me is part of a chapter in Doctor Who: The Inside Story, a book published in October 2006, so within a few months of finishing David Tennant’s first full season as The Doctor. The text draws a lot from interviews with cast and crew, including Louise Page, designer of David’s costume. She speaks at length about how the suit came to be and the stages they went through before they arrived at the final design.

Looking back at it, and now knowing what I know through researching the suit, there are a few comments which although they didn’t seem to make sense then, they very much do now . . .

Click on picture above to enlarge

Comparing fabrics

UPDATE ONE:

I recently met a Baron’s suit owner who’s suit is made from a new fabric. (You can see a report on the suit under Ten to the power of Two.) I have added this below in comparison to the swatch sample I was sent in 2008. 

UPDATE TWO:

I recently acquired a  swatch from what I believe is THE trousers on which the Tennant Suit is based. This is therefore the target for all other matches.

You can read more about it in Revelation Of The Trousers, and below is how the fabric measures up so you can compare it with the fabrics used for the replica suits below.

GAP trouser fabric - believed to be the fabric

Type of fabric: 100% cotton (according to label)

Fabric weight: Lightweight

Colour of fabric: Chocolate brown/beige (approx 70%/30% mix)

Colour of pinstripes: Cornflower blue

Width of pinstripes (in threads & mm): 5 threads - 1mm

Pinstripe repeat: 11.5mm

To fill a little time before I get stuck into my suit, I thought it worthwhile to take a step back and look at the fabrics used to make Tennant suits by some of the professional replica costume makers, as well as the fabric I will be utilizing for my own suit.

Most of the below is based on what I have observed in the fabrics I have been able to lay my hands on. If you have any additional information, please feel free to get in touch so I can revise appropriately.

To calculate the pinstripe spacings as accurately as possible, I measured 10 stripes and averaged the result, hence the very precise figures!

I have done my best to get the images as close to the original fabrics as possible, and relative to each other, so I believe this is a pretty fair visual comparison, though it may depend on your monitor, so please do not take this as the definitive colour match.

So, in the order they came on the scene, or to prominence, looking just at the fabric and not at the merits of the suits themselves or how they are made, here they are.