Re cost, I’ve just made a jacket to wear for my son’s wedding. Im not a very experienced sewer and not very confident.
the pattern was a free basic online pattern, just front, back and sleeves.
i made it up first in duvet fabric from a charity shop and used that to adjust the free pattern to fit perfectly - it’s amazing how much fabric you can acquire, often brand new, by looking in the bedding section of charity shops. I have a stash of pure cotton duvet covers and sheets with metres and metres of nice fabric for £1-£3 each, ideal for making toiles.
Once I knew it fitted i made it up a second time properly, again from my charity shop duvet stash, adding a lining and trying out some alterations to the sleeves and collar until I was happy with it. This gave me a perfectly useful casual jacket as well as confidence to start cutting my ‘expensive’ fabric.
and once it was adjusted perfectly, I finally made it in my proper Japanese fabric, knowing it was going to fit and look just like it was supposed to,
The first try took an hour or so to put together, the second maybe three hours as I fine tuned the fit, and the final jacket another three hours.
so the only real cost was a couple of meters of nice fabric, everything else was from a stash acquired very cheaply.
And I can now reproduce this jacket as often as I want knowing it’s tailored exactly to my size. No ‘one shops 12 is another shops 16’, or ‘fits at the waist, gapes at the neck’ issues to deal with.
An adjustable dummy altered (and padded!) to fit my size exactly was invaluable though, so I could work on it without constant putting on and taking off.