Buckram pocket template

No doubt you've seen this before if you've seen enough books/blogs/tutorials, but it's not a bad idea to make a template for your patch pockets. Here I used buckram, mainly because it's crisp enough, thin, and I have a lot on hand at the moment. It'll ripple a bit when steamed, and it may become sticky due to the sizing, so keep that in mind when deciding if it's appropriate for your particular fabric.

The template is slightly smaller than the pattern without the seam allowances or the fold-down facing; it's looking bigger than the pocket itself in this picture, even though it isn't actually (camera angle? color? I don't really know why.) Anyway, I put it on the wrong side of the pocket and pressed all the edges in around it. This fabric is quite bulky so there's distinctly less than the 5/8" seam allowance pressed in here, which is just as well because that makes it easier to shape the curves. Afterward I felled down all those edges by hand, so that this was not visible from the outside. This both keeps the seam allowance in place and will reduce lint formation as the pocket is used — another way to address that would be to both edgestitch and topstitch, such that the cut edge is between the two rows of stitching, but I wanted only edgestitching in this case.