Inauguration Coat: The Final Analysis

Now that I'm finally here I don't know what more I have to say!

I love my coat. It is warm and cute. I don't normally go around proactively telling people I've made what I'm wearing, but I just can't stop bragging about this coat!

New Techniques:

Extensively fusing the pieces with interfacing was new for me and I like the body it gives to the coat. Given how floppy my fabric is I should have fused the entire sleeve instead of just the top half.

Pressing was an issue with this much bulk. I don't have a clapper per se, but I have a rubber mallet so I used that to pound things flat. It really does make a difference. To get nice-looking darts, I cut them open as far as I could (zigzagging the edges to finish), pressed open, and rolled the points toward the center.

Likes:

I am pleased with all my little touches, like the lining pockets and the hanging loop (another thing copied from Melissa!), although frankly I'm afraid the coat is too heavy to be hung by the loop and I don't plan to use it except in case of emergency. But I like the way it looks back there, especially as contrasted with the navy facing.

Contrast navy hem extensions.

Faux welt pockets.

Fleece interlining. Immediately when I put it on the interlining starts trapping my body heat. It is so toasty inside the coat (but not sweaty). The interlining also helps block the wind. And I am inordinately proud of the fleece cuffs.

Dislikes/Mistakes/Slapdash:

Although I love raglan sleeves on coats during the sewing process because there is no painful easing in or sleeve heads or any of that jazz, I'm not sure I love the style when completed. The shoulder area is kind of shapeless. I had trouble with the pattern anyway because the shoulder was about 8 inches out from my real shoulder. So I kept having to take in the upper sleeve seam to get rid of the shoulder nipple problem. I should have fixed that in prep.

Based on the line drawing (the coat is unbuttoned in the editorial photo) I expected this to have more of a wide funnel neck going on. The neck is, in fact, pretty close fitting. Although it disappoints me as a style matter, it's better for warmth.

When I was still wearing it with the shameful basted hem I thought I regretted doing vertical buttonholes instead of horizontal, because I couldn't get the waist seams to stay put and lined up. But moving all the buttons down 1/4 inch fixed that. (I should also say, I never remember in reviews to mention that I pay zero attention to button and buttonhole markings on patterns. I place them according to my body and personal preference.) Someday I'll want to try bound buttonholes, but this was not the project.

The lining pulls the hem on the right side. I don't know why only on that side, and I'm lucky it doesn't pull both sides because I didn't shorten the lining at the waist as I had the fashion fabric so the lower circumference is slightly smaller.

I cut the front interlining on the facing line, figuring that the coat plus facings plus overlap would make four layers of wool, which would be plenty warm and the interlining might make it too bulky. I only feel the lack of interlining when it is very cold (mid 20s or below) and windy, but if I were to do it over I would cut the interlining to the full width at the left front and leave it at the facing line for the right front. That way the interlining wouldn't bulk up the buttonholes, but it would still be there. But as I've only noticed the issue twice in the several weeks I've been wearing the coat, this wasn't a huge error.

I don't think the list of dislikes is bad for how quickly I put this together!


You can see all the photos of the coat here, the pattern review is here, and all the posts here.

Previous posts:
Inauguration day
Sewing timeline
Pockets
Keeping warm
Aesthetics

Inauguration Coat: Aesthetics

Patrones in general has great editorial photos--they are model-y and artistic but still actually show the clothes. BWOF take note! This coat was an exception, unfortunately. Admittedly, my photo-of-a-photo at left is dark and shows no details, but it is really not much better than the original. They even chose this shot for the cover, which is a puzzling choice as it (1) shows little of the coat, and (2) what they show isn't interesting. There are about 25 other projects that would have made a more striking cover image, in my opinion. So I paid no attention to it in reading through the magazine until I got to the line drawing. Loved the line drawing with that darted funnel neck, princess shape, and slim line.



Actually, I wasn't quite sold on the slim line--volume is more my instinct--but I wanted to make a coat to last me many years. DC has a much longer winter than I care for but a limited very cold season (which I define as 30s or below) so I'll only wear it for a month or two each year. While empire lines and volume are all the rage right now, a slim-cut coat never goes out of style. However, I was concerned about walking ease. I didn't want to have a back slit because that would let wind in, so I decided on an inverted pleat at the center back. This meant adding a CB seam and re-drafting the pattern piece a bit, as shown at right.

I wanted a nice looking inverted pleat in the back. I interfaced the pleat itself with heavy interfacing, and then used lighter-weight interfacing all the way down the fold line, as seen here. Then I marked down the fold line; I should have marked the fold line even with the seam line, rather than with the edge of the pleat extension. To sew it up, first sew the CB seam from neck and then down 1 inch past the pleat extension, and then the CB seam of the pleat extension. Pin your marked fold line together and center your CB seams, so that the pleat is flattened.

To keep the pleat in place, topstitch in a triangle shape with the lower edge even with the bottom of the sewn pleat. To get the apex I measured 1 inch up from the bottom and drew chalk lines; I chose the 1 inch randomly, just based on aesthetics, not any kind of scientific reasoning. Then press and press and press that sucker in place. The pleat is holding up very well on the coat as I've been wearing it the past couple weeks. The folds have held their nice sharp edge.

I repeated the process for the lining, with the added step of edge-stitching the folds, both the outside and the inside folds. I considered doing this for the body of the coat, but decided that the wool was too heavy and the edge-stitching would look clunky. On the other hand, my rayon lining was so slippery and unstable that it wouldn't hold a press very well even with the interfacing reinforcement.

So I finished up the outer shell of the coat, and...ick. So incredibly blah. Patrones has limited sizes; this one comes in 40-44-48. I am a 34 on top. I have become pretty proficient in sizing down patterns as BWOF seldom publishes tops in a 34 (36 is usually the smallest size). I sized this coat down to a 36 to allow for plenty of ease for bulky clothing (not that I wear a lot of bulky clothing). So I will take part of the blame for not sizing down all the way to a 34, but really I think Patrones was a little misleading about the shape here. Or should I say the shapeless here. Not only that, but the pockets were too low to comfortably put my hands into and the inverted pleat started too low for my taste. Both of these are entirely my fault; I should have checked Patrones's pocket placement and I basically added the pleat extension in a random place.

Let's recall that I was doing this project in four days and I finished the outer shell on day 3. I really didn't know what to do. The purpose of the coat was to be warm. So can I live with a warm but unflattering coat? No. I really can't. I couldn't fall asleep until I'd figured out what to do. My choices were to take in the seams, which wouldn't help the pocket and pleat placement issues, or to cut it off somewhere between the bust and the waist and raise up the lower half. I decided on the latter.


I had intentionally not chosen a coat with an empire line so I didn't want to cut too high, but I had to cut it up high enough above the pockets that I could still lose some length, so I measured up one inch from the pockets, marked the line all around, took a deep breath, and chopped. Then I cut three inches off the (now) bodice. Next step was to take in the front and back princess seams, and add darts in the front (as the princess seams are very far to the side). Then I pinned the skirt back onto the bodice and marked the depth and location (back princess seams and front darts) of the new pleats. I fretted about the pleats a bit because my large inverted walking pleat in the back was about three inches down the skirt. I didn't want to add the pleats directly at the waist seam because I thought it would look weird to have pleats in two different places. Luckily, Cidell was visiting me and suggested that I sew the pleats down to the length of the large inverted pleat. A simple and perfect solution! I interfaced the pleats, though not all the way down to the hem as the were too shallow to press that far, sewed down three inches, and topstitched with triangles as I had the large inverted pleat. Stitched the pleats three inches down turned out really well, and fortuitously my pleats ended up being the same length as the darts I'd added on the front and the mirror images look quite nice. A stroke of luck!

I got this from the wool remnants table at Jomar in Philly, so I was limited to however much they had, which was a little over two yards. When I went to lay out the pattern, I realized I did not have enough fabric. Argh!!!! I could have looked for another pattern, but I didn't see how I was going to fit any knee-length coat onto what I had and I really had my heart set on the Patrones pattern. I was able to fit all the coat body pieces on, but with absolutely nothing left for the facings, even if they were pieced (you can see my pitiful pile of scraps!).

So I thought about it. Went to my fabric stash. Looked through the amazing cache of wools I received in The Carol Collection. Considered the plaid I later used to make my mom's skirt (sneak peek) but the plaid is a pink-purple and my coat fabric was a blue-purple and they just didn't work. Wished I had some black wool. Decided on navy as my best bet. The combo has totally grown on me and now I think it looks much better than black would have--less expected and more interesting. Carol saves the day!

So I cut my facings out of the navy and tried to figure out how else I could tie it in. When I ended up shortening the coat to deal with its shapelessness, I decided to add the length back in as a hem extension, and to use the contrast as the sleeve extension as well (as I explained in the keeping warm post I wanted extra-long sleeves on this coat). I really love the little touch these contrast hems add. It makes the coat so much more interesting, but because the navy is a sober color it doesn't look garish or costumey.

Not only do the hems add an interesting touch, they also saved my button dilemma. Since I have a large stash of buttons from Fabric Mart I try to find something in stash rather than buy more. I really didn't have anything I liked for this coat; I have some gold buttons that would be great for a coat but I was not feeling gold with the purple. I was a little worried because my four day plan did not include time to go shop for buttons. Once I added the navy touches, I realized I had the perfect navy buttons in stash. Problem solved!

And that's how I made the coat pretty.

I promise I'm almost done prattling endlessly about this coat! Just one more post to come: the final analysis.

Previously:
-Keeping Warm
-Pockets

All photos are here.

McCall 5466, Pleat Neck Dress: Buyer Beware

This is another project, like the Vogue 7898 mock wrap asymmetric hem dress, that I made back in October for my Germany trip. I am really liking the whole pleated neck detail thing that is so popular in the pattern books right now. I can't say I've actually seen it on the street or in store windows, but it's cute enough that I think it will catch on eventually.

This project was extremely frustrating. It is certainly an argument for muslining because I put a lot of work into a project that ended up being almost too uncomfortable to wear because of the draft of the armscye and sleeves.

The first challenge was lining. This being a Big 3 pattern, as is typical it did not provide for lining. Since I was making this in a wool (from The Carol Collection, of course!) it really needed to be lined for comfort, not to mention it just makes things nicer all around.

I first tried morphing the facing and the bodice pattern pieces into a non-pleat bodice to stabilize the neckline. However, when I put the unpleated bodice lining together it was way too tight and it was clear I wouldn't be able to skip the pleated parts of the neckline in the lining. So that was a couple hours down the tube. I ended up just cutting the bodice pattern out of lining fabric. Unfortunately, even with understitching the lining peeks out a little bit at the neckline.



After this it was the cutting layout. You can see here that I altered the pattern by narrowing the front dart for a small bust adjustment and shortening the skirt about an inch on the lengthen/shorten line. I am short, but most of my shortness is in my legs and I generally don't need to shorten above the waist. To match the plaids, I cut the fronts and backs along the same axes, and lined up notches across from one another. Because the skirt has pleats and therefore the top and bottom plaids couldn't match entirely, I decided to match up the vertical plaids at the centers front and back instead of sides front and back.

The next step was the pockets. This has hip pockets on the skirt; I liked the look but worried about the danger of them billowing out and widening my hips. I used cording slightly shorter than the length of the pocket and used the feed dogs the ease the pockets into it. This worked very well and the pockets are firm and secure.

Now was the actual sewing. Believe it or not I actually hand basted the side seams to get the plaids to match up, which they do, beautifully.

The back skirt pleats turned out to be awful over my large booty; you can see here that they pretty much stuck straight out. I closed up the bottoms of the pleats to make them into darts, and they lay well on the final product.

This dress took me a several weekends worth of sewing to finish because of all the effort I put into it. I was concerned about the fit of the armscye during construction, but foolishly assumed this problem would somehow take care of itself when the dress was all put together. Foolish, foolish assumption. I have an exquisitely constructed dress in which I can barely move (this is after going back in and sewing everything on the very edge of the seam allowances to give me more room). The photo at right illustrates the limited range of motions of my arms, and every time I try to lift something I feel like the seams are going to split. It is a huge disappointment after all that work. I can only wear it on days I know I won't be doing anything strenuous (which, let's face it, is most days, but it's hard to get in and out of so my two-a-days at the gym are a disincentive to wearing it to work).

Armscyes are so much trouble. Some, like this, are way too tight. I have a small frame and though I work out and am toned I don't think my shoulders and arms are abnormally large--or even necessarily as large as the average size. And then there are ones like the Tippi Hedren dress that are way too large. I really don't get it.

I'm not going to give up on this style, as there are a lot of other options. I bought Simplicity 2846 as a replacement for this pattern; it has raglan sleeves so I figure it will give a little more ease of movement. Though I bought Simplicity 2724 for the shirtdress view (I have been shopping stash for a while to figure out what to make it out of) it also has a pleat neck bodice view. And BWOF gave us one in a knit in 12-2008-113.

All photos of this project are here and the pattern review is here.

Inauguration Coat: Keeping Warm

Although I hoped for this coat to be cute, what it most definitely needed to be was warm. I realized this when I wore my green coat to Philly when I went with Cidell to meet up with Karen, Connie, E, and Elaray in November and FROZE. Now, granted, Philly in November is at least as cold as and possibly colder than it ever gets in DC but OMG. I might as well have been wearing a swimsuit for how warm the coat was keeping me. When planning the green coat I had intended to interline it; even bought the fleece. But I changed my mind because I figured that a wool cashmere blend fulled a bit in the washer and dryer would keep me warm. Ha! Now of course it would have been easier just to add an interlining to the green coat, but why do that when I can make a whole new coat? Especially as I had also realized that the green coat's light color is a weakness in addition to being a great feature; it shows every speck of dirt.

On that very trip to Philly during which I froze, I was seduced by the purple wool at Jomar (as Karen recalled!) and found the matching lining. The wool was in the remnants at $4/yd, and the lining was also $4/yd as I recall, which is rich living at Jomar but it was the piece that I loved so it was worth the "high" price. I assumed it was poly, but when I got it home it turned out to be rayon so that was handy. As with the green coating, I washed the purple to full it as much as I could. It turned out to have some kind of HORRIBLE HORRIBLE sizing on it that smelled absolutely dreadful. It took a couple more washings to get it out and the hand changed completely to be very floppy and blanket-like, which was unfortunate but I probably would have gotten cancer had I worn it with whatever that god-awful toxic sizing was still in it so oh well.

My corduroy jacket is way warmer than it has any right to be, and I can only assume that it's due to the fleece lining, which is looking pretty pilled and ratty but I love the coat so much I can't give it up. So I knew I'd have to use that fleece I bought for the green coat to interline this one. This is just regular Joann fleece; not any kind of special microfleece or lining fleece or flannel-backed fleece or whatever. Yes, it's bulky, but this is a winter coat we're talking about here. I'm ok with bulky in a winter coat.

The first thing I did on this coat was to cut out and construct the fleece interlining. Again I piggybacked on Melissa's coat-making experience. One of the things she did was trim off all the seam allowances on her interlining pieces and hand-sew them to the seam allowances of the coat to reduce bulk. Now, that is too extreme for me, but I took away the lesson about reducing bulk and constructed it on the serger. Which is also just fun. And then the serger scraps made excellent stuffing for the top half of the paper tape double I'm working on. It was a total win-win situation. I was wearing it around after it was done and it was so warm! I knew I'd made the right call.



After the outer shell of the coat was constructed, I hung it inside out on my dress form and hand-tacked the interlining at key points: neck, shoulder, in the back above the inverted pleat, underarm, at the top and bottom seams at the end of the sleeve, and a couple points along the front. I had fused the front along the facing line with a heavy interfacing and tacked the interlining only to the interfacing. I am hoping that it won't eventually pull the interfacing off, but I have left the lining hem free of the coat hem so I can always go up into the guts of the coat and fix things.

I already talked about my fleece pocket lining on the pocket post. The pockets are so warm for putting my hands in!

Another thing I had learned from my corduroy jacket and green coat is that I wanted the sleeves to be long, at least down to my knuckles. On both of the previous projects the sleeves end right at my wrist, and this is just not long enough for a coat! I was particularly frustrated with myself at the green coat because I had already made the cordouroy jacket and knew I wanted longer sleeves, and yet somehow even though I cut them super long on the green coat they still ended up short. Argh! This was my do-over. I cut the sleeves as long as I could, but because I had bought the fabric as a remnant I didn't have quite enough of it. I arranged my cutting layout so that I would have two pieces left over large enough to add sleeve extensions.

Then I hit upon doing the sleeve extensions in the contrast fabric I used for the facings. Nice. OK, so the sleeves were going to be long enough, but how to make them warm enough? Fleece cuffs! Now this was a delicate operation. I had cut the sleeves of the interlining off a little above the cuff line and then made little fleece cuffs. I *should* have slipped them on before bagging the sleeve linings but of course I didn't, so I had to unpick the stitching, slip the cuffs on and then rebag. Next step was to mark the hem crease in the sleeves. That done I pulled the bagged sleeves back out, pushed the fleece cuffs down to meet the marked crease, pinned in place, pushed the bagged sleeves back out, and topstitched the cuffs in place.

Of course, I later realized I hadn't got either sleeve's hem right and the sleeves were hanging all awkwardly. So I had to unpick my topstitching and do the whole thing over again. Grumble grumble. The pics were taken first time around so you can't see that when I went back in I interfaced along the cuff fold line, which gave me a much crisper edge. This time I put in four rows of topstitching and they are really cute *and* add some structure so the sleeve hems aren't all floppy. All this annoying work with the bagging and the unbagging and the pulling the bagged sleeves in and out and in and out (I felt like it was Thanksgiving and I was spending hours and hours with my hands up a turkey's bum, even though I'm a vegetarian and have never done this) was totally, totally worth it. I am so glad I finally got the sleeve length right and the fleece cuffs keep the cold air from rushing in past my gloves.

You can see the length of the sleeves in this picture:



All photos are here.

Already discussed:
pockets

Still to come:
Aesthetics
Overall Review

Podcast!

Cidell and I were both home long enough to record a podcast! We discuss the January and February issues of BWOF--February just arrived in our mailboxes yesterday. Are we not punctual? We also talk about our current projects and our current mantras.

You can play it below, visit our Podbean channel or download us on iTunes.

If you go to either of those, please let me know what photo shows up. I've tried to upload a photo of me and Cidell but it's not showing up for me.

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