Last Project of the Year

Hope you all had a fine day yesterday, full of good cheer (or at least good food!).

My final project for the year 2011 is going to be a Burda envelope pattern.  Burda Kids 9533 is a coat and vest pattern with an optional hood, back yoke and center back seam. 

I was actually looking for something along the lines of a double breasted pea-coat, but this was the closest I could find.

I'll be making this without the hood, as I plan to make the jacket with wool melton.  Youngest Son has already picked out his lining fabric -- a nice teal Catalina shirting from Fabric.com.    I need to pop that into the washing machine to preshrink it -- something I'll probably get to this morning so it'll be ready to cut today.

The nice thing about Burda envelope patterns is that they're not as complicated as the magazine patterns for tracing out, though I don't like the flimsy paper, and of course they already have seam and hem allowances.

The downside: the one and only Burda envelope pattern I've used before was also a kids pattern -- for pants.  They were cool, too, and both Oldest Sons wore them.  They were crazy to make, though, because important pattern pieces were missing or weirdly drafted.

Cross my fingers that the jacket goes together better than the pants did. 

I'm hoping to make a bunch of things from the couple of Burda magazines I've bought through the classifieds on PatternReview -- I discovered that I can order a subscription through Amazon and I want to see if that's really want I want to do.  90 bucks for a year of patterns is such a great deal...but only if I like them.  I know I like European styling, but I'm not sure I'm going to enjoy that whole tracing, adding seam allowance, crazy Burda instruction thing.  I know people who can read German, French, and Spanish, though, and would be willing to translate for me.  Are the instructions any better in one of those languages?