Next Project -- Girls' Burda Coat

Daughter has been growing and she needs a new coat.  I have plenty of wool fabric -- the only thing lacking was a pattern.  So I went on a pattern search.  It surprises me how few dress coat patterns there are for little girls.  But I eventually found the perfect pattern from the Burda 12/2012 magazine.     And it was available for download.  So I bought it. 

It's the Girl's Dress Coat #156.  And it's perfect.

Now, the only downloadable patterns I've ever used are the HotPatterns available from Fabric.com.  And those are pretty simple.  This one isn't simple.  As a matter of fact, Burda rates it with an Advanced difficulty.  And I've only ever sewn one Burda magazine pattern, even though I own 3 or 4 of the magazines.  So I figure this should be  interesting.

Getting the pattern to print out correctly only took a little fiddling with the settings on my printer panel and a couple of tries (always print the page with the scaling gauge on it first).  The pattern was 25 printed pages.  Whew! 

Crawling around on the living room floor taping them all together was pretty painless, too.  Burda at least numbers the rows and columns so it's rather difficult to get lost.

Traced pattern pieces

I'm used to tracing patterns, since I've been doing that for years.  But adding those seam allowances?  That took some doing.  I'm sure not used to that, but I think I've got it. 

And there's quite a few pieces.  The coat has a lining, and a collar, and piping, and facings, and a two-piece sleeve, and pockets with flaps.  Daughter was sure excited about the pockets with the pocket flaps.  Her brother has a coat with pocket flaps (another Burda, incidentally, though it's an envelope pattern) and she's been wanting the same ever since. 

It's also supposed to have shoulder pads, but I think I'm skipping those unless it looks like it really needs them in the end.  I'd have to make special mini shoulder pads.  Hmmm.  That might be fun just for the novelty value.

So, it's all traced out.  The wool I'm using is a flannel in a plain weave.  I have three pieces: a solid rose, a solid gray, and a mustard, red, gray plaid (ooh, it's prettier than it sounds).  I don't have enough of the rose for the whole coat, so I'm going to coordinate them and try to make something cute out all three.  I have an idea already...