Planning the next project

Well, I've been so busy the past three weeks that I haven't been able to get anywhere near my sewing. That doesn't stop me from planning and getting ready for my next project though! So, what is it? I'm going to make an olive green/khaki linen Minoru jacket for the summer. I've spent sooooo long daydreaming about how this jacket is going to finish up. Do you do that too? Hours of thinking about every element, discarding some things and having light-bulb moments about others. Or am I just a mad-sewing-woman?You really don't have to answer that question!

So back to the Minoru. I've bought the pattern and now it's on to the fabric. I've surfed the internet looking for the right colour of linen. You see, the problem is that I recently threw out the lovely olive green/khaki summer jacket I've had for about 6 years. Now I need to replace it so the planned new jacket has 'big sleeves to fill'!

I finally found some suitable coloured linen on Stone Fabrics website and sent off for samples of 4 contenders. When I got home tonight, they were waiting for the selection to begin.

Yes, one of the samples is a lovely wine red colour, slightly different from the colour in this photo. I don't really do pastels....

The two dark green samples are 100% linen and the lightest green and the wine red are 53% linen 45%viscose and 2% Lycra. The only difference between the two types of fabric is that the linen-viscose-lycra cloth feels smoother than the 100% linen but there's not much in it really. I actually like the idea of stretch linen to avoid baggy knees on linen trousers!

The selection was made pretty quickly. It's the top left dark green/khaki 100% linen. It looks more green in real life than this photo. here's a link to it on the website. I've just ordered 3.5m of it, to allow for pre-washing shrinkage and to lengthen the body pieces for me.

So, what are the next steps? For the lining I've been thinking of silk as I'd like as much of this as possible to be natural fibres for the summer and silk seems the right choice. I've never sewn with silk before, anyone got any tips?

So excited, now just need to wait for the linen to arrive...!