First version of a tight fitting vest

I made a pinstripe vest to go with the blazer, but that was after I had made one vest already. The pattern was from the English language version of Burda, issue 10/2011, pattern 126. This first version had minimal changes, meaning I only added 6 cm to the waist due to the size 40 pattern having smaller waist than I have. The addition was easy to do by narrowing the front darts. You can see that in the rightmost pattern piece in the picture below.

The steps for making the outer part were: sew the darts, sew the side and shoulder seams, try the vest on (no changes were needed), and sew the fake pockets. I'm not a fan of fake pockets, but there was so little room that functioning pockets would have been tiny. Note also that if I had trusted my changes in the darts, I could have made the fake pockets after sewing the darts and before sewing the side and shoulder seams.

I made the lining using the same fabric I used for the back piece. I only had 60 cm of the front fabric, so I wanted to spare it, so that's why I made the outer back using the lining fabric.

After sewing the front facing to the front lining and sewing the shoulder seams, I placed the outer and lining right sides together and sewed all the other edges except the sides.

Then I turned the vest right side out and sewed the side seams. The first side is easy as you can access it through the other side (both sides are open at this point) and sew all around (outer and lining). The remaining side is trickier, because you need to get the right sides together and sew as long seam as possible. Basically, you need to start from the lining side, go all the way across the outer side and then for as long as you can on the lining side again. In practice, that means there will be about 10-15 cm opening left in the side seam on the lining side. Then you just sew the opening closed from the right side of the lining.

The last part was making buttonholes and sewing the buttons. The vest turned out looking fine, but feeling a bit short at the back. I had already found out earlier that I have longer back than average, so I should have guessed. I fixed that problem in the pinstripe vest (I'll post about that later).

Last but not least, here is a closeup of the buttons. I got them at a recycling center, so they were removed from some garment that could not be resold. I'd really like to know what that was, given the text in the buttons.