Hello Vogue -- Thank you for the Men's Peacoat Pattern

My guys all like to wear Pea Coats in the wintertime.  And there is nothing so nice and warm in a New England winter as a wool melton Pea Coat.  I had to break down and buy one for each of my older sons last year, after a long and fruitless search for a pattern that would do the job.  Granted, I'd never sewn a men's coat before, but I was ready to take up the challenge.  I have made a wool melton coat for Youngest Son, and I rather figure the men's version is just larger.  And bulkier.  And harder to handle.  But I was ready.

But the pattern companies let me down.  *sigh*

Well, I was browsing patterns a couple of days ago, and look what I came across! Vogue 8940 Men's Jacket and Pants.  Designed for heavy wools.  Woo hoo!  Wee Hee!  Get outta my way, I'm goin' to the fabric store to pick that baby up!

Progress on the Melton Coat

I'm getting there!  I worked steadily on it all weekend, stealing little bits of time (and some two hour blocks, too!) here and there whenever I could.  I made fantastic progress, even though I decided to do lots of interfacing, a back stay, and shoulder reinforcement.   Just hems, shoulder pads,  and buttons left to go -- but those always seem to take the most time and are the least fun  :o(

Progress on the Wool Melton Coat

Whew!  Took me two hours, but I finally got all the pieces for my new coat cut out and sorted.

The melton is smoke colored.  The lining is a black and gold metallic sari fabric from JoAnn's.  Heavy weight interfacing.  Haven't picked out the buttons yet.

I shortened the pattern by 5 inches since I wanted this coat to be not quite as long as the one I made before, but that's the only thing I did differently from last time.  So it should turn out to be about the same length as the orange one in the picture.

Maybe I'll get time to work on it some more this weekend.  After all, the sewing is up next and that's the fun part :o)

New Coat of Wool Melton

I got my fabric washed and hung to dry last night and so I'm ready to go with a new coat for myself.  I'm going to make another version of Butterick 5685.

The first version I made in the Fall of 2011 and I've been wearing it as my winter coat ever since.  I wear a wool sweater underneath it when it is particularly cold, but for the most part, it is a very cozy country winter coat.

What I'd like now is a city coat.

My plan is to make the Butterick coat in its shortest length, and give it at least two inside pockets so I have places to put my stuff.  When I go to the city, I hate carrying a purse -- not because I'm afraid of purse snatchers -- but because I hate having my hands perpetually tied up with holding something, so I've decided pockets are a must.

My fabric is a smoke colored dark charcoal wool melton that I got from Fabric.com a couple of years ago.  I really bought it as more of a jacket rather than a coat fabric so it's not that really thick coating melton, but the lighterweight jacket variety.  I think it'll be fine, though.

So why am I making a new coat this late in the season, with Spring just around the corner?  We're planning another trip into Boston, to see the Dropkick Murphys in concert, and I need a new coat :o)  With any luck, I'll get a new pair of shoes, too.  Specifically, these from http://www.onlineshoes.com.  Classy or what?

Girls' Burda Coat -- Long Review and Lots of Pictures!

Whew!  So it's finally finished.  After two weeks of working very carefully on this thing, I think I can finally call it finished.  I have so many things to be pleased about.

First, I got it finished and it looks beautiful, inside and out.  Second, it fits.  A little too well perhaps, for there is very little room for Daughter to grow.  On the other hand, that means I get to make another one next year.  Third, I finished it in time to enter it into the Pattern Review Sewing for Children contest.  After missing the deadline for the LBD contest, this is a big deal to me.  And fourth and most important, Daughter loves it.  I say again.  I am pleased.

Let's start with the pattern.  This is a Burda magazine pattern, 12/2012 #156.  I downloaded it from the BurdaStyle site, taped all the pages together, and ended up with the awesomest little girl coat pattern ever.  Never mind that I had to add seam allowances.  It's a great pattern.

Burda suggests wool tweed with velvet collar and piping.  I did mine in a wool plain weave flannel that I bought from Miss Fairchild of Pattern Review either earlier this year or last year.  I used three different fabrics: a rose, a gray, and a plaid.  All pretty much the same weight, though the plaid is a touch lighter than the other two.  It's lined with a spruce green polyester silky fabric bought from JoAnn's as stash lining fabric God-only-knows when.


The instructions, like all Burda instructions, were vaguely incomprehensible.  After reading through them once, I decided logic would have to serve me well on this project.  Having never made a coat quite like this before, it's a good thing I learned logic while learning how to write in Java and C++.  Because I had to logic my way through the Whole. Darn. Thing.

The first thing I love about this pattern is the pockets, complete with pocket flaps.  No fake pockets for my Daughter, these are the real deal.  Set into the waist seam, the pockets should have been easy.  I had to make three tries, though, to get them in just right.  I'm glad I kept working at it because in the end they turned out beautifully.


Getting the piping (it's not actually real piping because it has no cord but I'm gong to call it piping anyway) to curve around the edges of the pocket flaps was a real challenge, but add some steam and heat to wool fabric and it's putty in your hands, so to speak.

And I think the idea of two-piece sleeves in a little girl's coat is just plain cool.  So grown up and everything.  I doubt Daughter cares that her coat has two-piece sleeves, but I positively adore it.  The sleeves gave me a bit of trouble, too, as I didn't realize until I had fought to line up the sleeve cap, decided it was a lost cause, and bound the whole thing  that the side seam was not supposed to match up with the sleeve seam.  Duh.

Did I mention that I bound all the seam allowances.  Every last one, excepting the pockets (which on second thought maybe I should have) and the seam joining the fabric to the lining.  I simply cut some pretty quilting cotton I had lying around, folded and pressed it into binding and sewed it on all the seam allowances.  It's not even bias cut, just straight grain.  Didn't matter, since I didn't need any stretch anyway.



Binding the waist seam did give me a bit of trouble with all that bulk when I tried to put the bottom buttonhole in.  I ended up having to scrunch it out of the way while still keeping the facing in place to sew the buttonhole.  That was tense, but I got it in the end.

I also bound the facing edges.  I always like to see bound facings whenever it's practical.

And the back has this nice pleat which increases the bottom width for active girls who like to run around on the playground.

I got these really cool buttons at JoAnn's last year. I love metal buttons, so I grab the classy ones whenever I see them.  Daughter picked these out of many to choose from.

And the hems got a semi-decorative stitch for the binding, but I hand sewed the hem in place.  I used Steam-a-Seam first to keep the darn thing in place before I stitched.  Marvelous stuff, that Steam-a-Seam.  I've got to remember to use it more often.

So I had this thing all finished a couple of days ago when Daughter mentioned she'd like to wear her purple leopard print jacket with the hood underneath it.  Um, leopard print and plaid?  I don't think so.  Turns out she just wanted to have the hood.  So I sorted through my trusty pattern collection until I found a hood that I thought would work.  New Look 6853 has long been out of print, I think, but I used this pattern for Youngest Son's pants for a long time.  There is a jacket pattern in there too, and whaddayaknow, it has a hood.

So I used this pattern to create a hood in the plaid fabric that sits under the collar.












The hood buttons on and off.  The only problem is the buttons catch on her braid.   I'm thinking I can make another hood in the gray fabric I used for the piping.   Maybe I could make a placket that covers the buttons.  And then Daughter could change her hood to suit her mood.  I wonder if she'd like that idea?

So there it is.    This is a great pattern.  Everything goes together beautifully and even the sleeve cap wasn't hard to ease into the armscye.  It was alot of work.  And worth every minute.  I look forward to doing it again next year.

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)