Kente-Trimmed Sweatshirt Jacket & Matching Bag

Description

I wanted something colorful to wear to our local holiday celebration here in Washington State, so following the popular trend of adapting a sweatshirt into a jacket,  I took a Walmart sweatshirt as my base and turned it into a statement jacket. I arranged the strips to this order/design, cut the sweatshirt into sections, topstitch the strips of kente-print cotton — from a jelly roll I picked up from Quiltin w/ Soul — vertically down the body and around the cuffs. Black toggle closures run down the front, which felt like the right finishing touch to let the kente strips read as the star of the piece rather than getting lost next to a zipper or buttons.

To go with it, I made a matching bag using a pattern I’m developing based on construction I adapted — this one is the third prototype. It has a recessed bottom for structure and stability, plus a zipper overlay opening at the top rather than a simple zipper-in-a-seam closure. I pulled the same kente fabric from the jelly roll into the bag’s trim and handle details so the two pieces would read as a set rather than just two things that happen to be the same colors.

This was as much a design exercise as a finished outfit — refining the bag pattern while using up the last of a jelly roll I loved too much to shelve. I’m happy with how the sweatshirt-as-jacket idea turned out, and the bag prototype is getting closer to a pattern I’d be ready to share.