Sewing: Seminole Patchwork Trim on a Jacket

Once upon a time, I saw an article about making a Seminole-style headband for a cowboy hat.

I ended up with some leftovers. One reason was that I had misinterpreted the instructions, and I made the patchwork short and fat instead of long and skinny. And the other reason was that I had just made too much, even when I did it right.

I will talk a bit about how to do Seminole patchwork below. But first, I would like to talk about the jacket and how I used the leftovers.

This is one of my basic jacket patterns - a simple jacket that is just asking to be embellished somehow.

There was enough patchwork to accommodate three placements.

There is a piece on one of the pockets. And there are a couple of pieces near the shoulder - theoretically drawing the eyes away from the lower body, and making the shoulders look wider. The angles of these pieces were determined by the length of the strips of patchwork.

The patchwork is framed by some rust-coloured binding. The patchwork is sewn to the jacket with a decorative stitch on that binding. The rust-coloured fabric is also used to create piping for the front and neckline edges of the jacket.

And no, I never did wear the cowboy hat with the jacket!

There are a lot of good resources about this type of patchwork. There are also some good resources about the Seminole Indians of Florida, and how they came to use it. For example, check this Seminole Tribe website.

Seminole patchwork starts with an assortment of long strips of fabric - usually three, sometimes more. Sew these together to make a long strip.

Then cut the fabric into sub-units (quilters do this regularly). Sometimes the strips are cut crosswise, and sometimes they are cut at an angle.

Then the individual units are sewn back together, but with each unit offset from the other. Sometimes they are offset so that seams will align, and sometimes they are offset so that a seam is in the middle of the adjacent block.

Finally, the triangular edges are trimmed, and an interesting piece of patchwork emerges.

Here is a website for making a cute Seminole bookmark out of paper.

By varying the width and number of the original strips, the angle of the sub-cuts, and the positioning of the sub-units when resewing, there are a lot of possibilities. Try them!