Girl's Burda Coat -- Nearly Finished Sneak Peek

This has been fun.  I've never made a jacket like this: so complicated and so cute!

And since Burda's instructions are so delightfully sparse, I've had to puzzle out alot of things in the assembly process.  Which has been challenging.  Which means I really enjoyed myself.

The first challenge: getting the not-quite-real piping to go smoothly around the curved pocket flaps.  It's not quite real because it doesn't have any cord inside.  Do you still call it piping if it doesn't have cord?  And if not, what do you call it?

Because I'm using wool, I could press it all I wanted.  I discovered that if I sewed it to the one pocket flap piece, I could press it to death to make it lie flat enough to attach the other pocket flap piece smoothly.  Nice.








The other tricky part was the pocket openings.  Since the pockets are in a seam, it should have been easy, but somehow I just could not wrap my brain around how to do it at first.  Took me several tries, but I finally got those babies in.  The waist seam piping is a little less than perfect because of the difficulty I had, but it still looks pretty good.

The other, other tricky part was those darn two-piece sleeves.  It wasn't until I sewed them in, accepted that I was never going to get the notches at the sleeve cap lined up just right, and bound the seams that I realized the underarm-ish seam of the sleeve was not supposed to match the side seam.  Duh!  My excuse there is that I have little experience with two-piece sleeves.  I know better now.  Took me two hours to rip off the binding of both sleeves and redo both seams.  Serves me right for being dumb.

The lining went together pretty easily.  Daughter picked this spruce color, which has absolutely nothing to do with the colors of the coat but seems to go with it well enough.

In any event, it's all assembled.  The neckline seam has not yet been trimmed and notched, the hems aren't in, I haven't done the buttonholes and buttons yet, and it hasn't been pressed.  But here's a sneak peek of what it looks like.  I don't have a good display dummy for Daughter's size, so you'll have to wait to see the whole thing in all it's glory until it's done and I can take Daughter out to get some fun pics around town.  Could be a few days, but you'll just have to wait :o)