If you can diagram it for me without the confusing sequins, that would be awesome. I’m just having a hard time wrapping my head around it.

I find it odd that a zipper is used at all; most of the classic Chanel suits are famous for their meticulous handworked buttonholes… I guess this might depend on whether this is a RTW piece of from a runway show.

Calculating it is one thing, recording it is another. The calculation may tell you to shift the stripe by 1.234 inches, but a typical pattern maker’s ruler won’t be of much help with that degree of precision. Whereas with the raw-edges-butted-up method, the match stripe will match perfectly at the seamline, cause that’s where you drew it.

This reminds me of one of my favorite math quiz questions ever (3rd grade): If you have a towel rack that’s 21 inches wide, and 4 9″ by 30″ towels, how many towels can you fit on the towel rack at once?

Answer: all 4. Just fold them first.

Kathleen, I apologize for getting so OT…I’ll stop now.

I knew there had to be another way, but the mathematics of it were just too tempting. [engr] And since when is finding an angle and its tangent “complicated”? There is simply no way that anything is more precise or accurate than calculating it. 8~) [/engr]

re: the invisible dart., I now suspect that the second horizontal row of sequins–the one just below the boobies– is concealing a SEAM. (!) Do you see how the faint lines of the plaid below the sequins seem stretched relative to the row above –and Alison, I see what you’re talking about on the right side of the photo: The stripe is offset in the armpit, but to me it looks like the offset neatly coincides with the row of sequins, whereas the white and grey sections remain the same width (pretty much) everywhere, which wouldn’t be true if there were a dart. SO I think the jacket front was cut in four pieces–two top sections, which were eased into two bottom sections. pretty amazing.

I don’t think the CF looks eased–to me, the edges of the both grey section seem to match up all the way down, but the fact that the grey section looks to me to be a slightly asymmetrical grouping of sub-stripes, it really defies the eye. And the sequins don’t help.–I have to “jump over” the sequins to see if I’m still on track.

I’m certain the sequins were put there to discourage this type of analysis ;P

If I’m right, the jacket was not laid out like ‘A’ in Kathleen’s drawings at all. Rather, it was laid out so that the two front pieces are rotated 180 degrees to match up with each other. That’s why the substripes don’t match up, but the edges of the stripe grouping does. I’ve posted an image of my hypothesis on the discussion board.

What I’m wondering is whether this arrangement prevents the spiralling effect that would occur with either ‘A’ or ‘B.’…? By that, I mean the way seams spiral around the body when a garment is cut on the bias so that the grain points in the same direction all the way around. A chevron arrangement naturally balances this effect, but to get an apparent continuous stripe maybe some trickery was required.

The thing that really impresses me about this jacket is that the stripe on the sleeve visually matches up with the stripe on the jacket, rather than matching it at the sleevecap/armscye, where it wouldn’t match for very long, anyway….and that the whole positioning of the stripes avoids the heavy grey stripe near the armscye/sleevecap, which would look jarring because they don’t match. wow.

Anyway, calculations are way less accurate than butting-up, which can’t possibly fail, no matter what inaccuracies exist in your equipment.