Now that the body and sleeve of the jacket have had a first fitting, it's time to draft the hood. I want the hood to be in three pieces for a better fit, and I want it to wrap all the way around to the edge of the lapel. This means that I had to do a few fittings to get that wrap portion away from my chin, but still close enough to wrap.

In the photos above (click to enlarge), you can see where I began (top left) with the basic hood draft based on my head measurements. The inner curve marks the location of the seam for the center panel, which will be double the width seen in the picture. To get this width, I measured the top of my head, divided by two and measured that far in from the outer curve of the hood. Then I cut that piece off, removed the squared off section (drawn at the apex of the curve) and taped the two pieces together to get the piece you see in the upper right photo. Next I straightened the right hand side of the pattern piece and trued the curves on the left. The straight line is the new center line. The bottom left photo shows the center panel piece in comparison to the basic rectangle I was going to try. They are basically the same in the end, except that the new center panel has curves to help shape the hood at the back of the neck.

Now, this first draft was not the winner. If I wasn't trying to do an extended wrap around the front it probably would have been fine. However, with the wrap it is just way too close fitting. You can see how close it fits around my chin...no good. I wanted to have more room in the head, and I also needed to get that wrap down away from my face a bit. To do this, I used matching points on both panels, and slashed and spread by 1/2 inch on the center panel, and at the back seam of the side panel, opening up to 1 1/2 inches at the front.

It turns out that spreading 1 1/2 inches in the face part of the hood gave enough extra length in the hood, but not where I wanted it. I wound up with funny little wings right at the level of my glasses.

Close, but not quite. I really wanted that extra length down by my chin. It's still pretty close to my face down there, and I can tell that when the hood is attached to the lapel of the jacket it will pull the whole hood down. So, I closed up the slash at the temple to 1/2 inch at the back and 3/4 inch at the front, and slashed down from the chin to the neckline to spread it 1 inch. This gives me a total of 1 3/4 inches more than the original draft.

I'm pretty confidant that this last change is going to be the winner. I will be making up one more muslin with hood and sleeves attached to check all my seams and fit one last time. If you are interested in watching how I drafted the center piece for the three-piece hood, you can watch the video here. Parts one through three can be found here.

Moto Bike Jacket: part four