Ultimate Tennant Suit - doing it for real

This week I start work on the most fascinating, incredible and AWESOME project I have undertaken so far – making a Tennant Suit jacket.

Now, this wont’t be just any jacket – this will be the ULTIMATE jacket. Why? Well, because I am working from SIX PAIRS OF ORIGINAL GAP TROUSERS!

For those that don’t know, it was revealed in the pages of Doctor Who: The Inside Story, that the original brown suit had been inspired by a pair of trousers David Tennant took a shine to. There was no matching jacket to make it a suit, so Lousie Page bought as many pairs of the trousers as she could find and took them apart to then use to make a jacket!

You can read further about this in my entry, Revelation Of The Trousers.

What Lousie didn’t say was where the trousers had come from, but after a chance find in a charity shop, it was discovered that they had come from GAP!

Since then, three have been various attempts to match and re-weave the fabric used, however, what has never been tried is to get the right trousers and repeat the technique that had been employed to make the real deal – until now !

The six pairs of trousers I have been given to work with are of various sizes, and sadly of varying quality.

Here is a pair-by-pair run-down of them:

Pair 1 - 
Size 34 x 30

Condition: Excellent. No color fading or signs of wear. Missing 1 button on the back pocket.

Pair 2 - 
Size 34 x 34

Condition: Excellent. No colour fading or signs of wear.

Pair 3 - 
Size 36 x 34

Condition: Decent. Ever-so-slightly lighter in color than the others, but if positioned correctly the difference isn’t too obvious. There is slight wearing on the hip pockets, crotch, and knees where the fabric appears much lighter and worn off in those areas. I found though that flipping the trousers inside out reveals the inside shows the damage less. So determining which sides of the fabric have less wear will also be a factor in this project.

Pair 4 - 
Size 33 x 32

Condition: Excellent/Decent. A little color fading at the knees but better than the previous pair.

Pair 5 - 
Size 33 x 32

Condition: Poor. This one is sadly the worst of the batch. There’s heavy fading and it’s scratched up worse than an old chalkboard. My guess is that the owner used bleach or at least some type of bleaching agent when they washed their clothes because this is several shades lighter brown than the all the rest of my trousers. I also imagine they balled them up and let them sit under a heavy pile of junk for months on end since they’re almost permanently wrinkled and covered in scratch lines :(

Pair 6 - 
Size 33 x 32

Condition: Excellent. No colour fading or signs of wear.

My first, labourious task, is to carefully un-pick and extract the usable parts of the trousers. Spare me some thoughts as is sit hunched over them, slitting their seams!