Maaaannn...if only nostalgia weren't in the way? I would have bought Nami a new leather a year ago. But, Nami likes THIS jacket because it is beat up looking, and perhaps (?) even cuz it is the jacket she bought at the vintage shop on Broadway so that she could date me. It wasn't the only time that I got a girlfriend to buy a leather jacket so she could ride on the back of my bike, but Nami was the only one who bought chaps and her own helmet too. How's that for dedication? (And that was probably only a couple weeks into us dating...but then, I told her I was going to marry her on our first date...second time out together...yup.)

So anyway, it must have been a year ago by now that I finally decided to buy Nami's jacket some red satin to make a new liner. The old one was trashed, but when I removed it to take measurements and copy it, I saw it was pieced together in a way that would only make sense to a thumb-twiddler on Thorazine, or someone under a delusion that more seams would act as spiritual armour against cookie-spitting-vorple-beasts with 3rd eye lazers and prehensile, projectile nose hair. But no, the liner was absolute nonsense, so I put the jacket and material in a closet and left it there for a long, long time.

I took it out to restart what I had begun several times, but each time that wacko construction of the old liner just bewildered me to the point where I decided I was not up to the challenge of making a new one. This week we talked about paying someone to reline it, and that pushed me to try again. I had already bought 1.5meters of red satin and it was going to go to waste if I didn't at least give it my best shot.

Our sewing machine is also a fussy shard of hell, so I got smart and realized that sewing satin was going to be seriously evil (it is slippery) and furthermore, if I just put satin directly against the leather shell -- as the last person did -- the liner was just going to get trashed right away. (I am assuming the previous liner was not the original, as it was only 1 layer of thin satin, with no quilted padding at all) To strengthen the liner and to make sewing the satin easier, I decided to backup the main liner with some leftover cotton material I had. This will also keep seams from ripping out easily, and just all sorts of happy things like that.

I did the back and front tonight, and will go for the sleeves tomorrow. There is still some other repair to do on the leather before I can install the liner, and I may actually replace the pocket material while the liner is off, but this liner is the MAIN challenge. After this, it will be easy.

If you are thinking "What makes this guy think he can just sew a jacket liner?", I should say that as a kung-fu student our master not only made us sew our own kung-fu belts, but fricking EMBROIDER the Chinese characters for "Shaolin Temple" on the things! Years later, I sewed my own dress-uniform for kung-fu, and then a jacket for working out, etc. So, now I can sew pretty well. Oh, and I also made both the banners for the school as well as the curtains. I'm just all kinds of skilled huh? I will update this post when I get further along the project.

Part II

Just before I decided to shell out some dough to fix the PC I began repair work on Nami's water buffalo. Well, I really doubt this hard leather is cow. But I sewed up a few holes in the leather, and I had patched the insides of the pockets a while back but thought "Shit, I am really going to some major effort to fix this thing, I may as well rip out the pockets and replace them with something more sturdy than SATIN. I mean, what kind of stupid jacket maker uses satin for pocket liners? Oh, the same people who put thin-ass cotton in the pockets of MY leather huh? I used black cotton CANVAS in these 3 pockets! They are gonna hold strong I reckon.

But now that I am done with all of that, now comes another tricky area...installing the liner that I made. So, before it gets all red, satiny and sexy, I thought I would just share the last look at the shell, not to be seen for another 20 years. Nami's comment about me this past couple weeks was, "The unemployed are so busy". (Bimbo wa hima nashi)

Labels: Motorcycle gear