Yesterday I mentioned that I’ve started sewing the asymmetric, collared coat from the Winter 2011 MyImage magazine, and after a prep period that felt like forever (probably exasperated by the fact that my ironing station is hovering around 0C/30F), I’ve now got some progress to show you!
I’m sewing this up in a wonderful purple basketweave/boucle coating, which was another gift from Claire (she’s so good to me!) at the end of last winter. I always like to underline my coats when I can to just add that little bit of extra warmth, but it made even more sense here as it will help to stabilise the coating fabric and prevent any bagging out that might otherwise occur with looser-weave fabrics. The alternative is to block-fuse the coating with a lightweight interfacing, like I did with my Patrones duffle coat.
For this coat, all the facings were interfaced (the usual front and back facings, plus the front and back hip band facings), and pretty much everything else was underlined in black cotton flannel. This meant there was a lot of prep – everything but like 3 pieces needed underlining or interfacing! I love sewing, but prepping is dull dull dull work!
I machine-basted the flannel underlining to the coat pieces here, because frankly, the prep work was tedious enough as it was. I normally hand baste my underlinings, but in this case, the coating and the flannel “grabbed” each other quite nicely, so this, plus the walking foot, plus a long basting stitch meant it felt okay to do it by machine. I still made sure to never turn any corners though (when basting underlinings, you always stitch to the edge, cut the threads, reposition, and stitch the adjacent side so that you don’t create puckers at the corner)!
On the subject of underlining, I highly recommend Sarah Veblen’s “The Techniques of Underlining Garments” course on Pattern Review if you’re at all interesting in learning more! She usually runs it once a year, and the next one is starting on 5 March.
The pocket bags and coat lining will be in the bias tartan satin I bought from Mood in NYC, since there’s a bunch leftover from my trench jacket and the purple stripe in the tartan looks nice with the purple coating.
When I’m working with thick coating, my preferred option is to catchstitch all the seam allowances to the underlining by hand, so that these are guaranteed to lie flat and not creates ridges that annoy me during wear. With coating, it seems like it doesn’t matter how much your press and steam the seam allowances open, they have a tendency to shift around in normal use. Most recently, I did this on Holly’s maternity coat and also on my duck egg blue winter coat, but I don’t usually do it for jackets or thinner fabrics.
I was a bit too lazy/impatient to catchstitch all the body seams here, but I absolutely always catchstitch the sleeve seam allowances, because any ridges on the sleeves really bug the everloving crap out of me!
You can see above that the right side of the sleeve seam is lovely and flat, because on the inside I’ve taken some pink silk basting thread and just tacked the seam allowances flat against the panel. The interior is quite colourful here, what with the purple coating, black underlining, blue basting stitches, and pink catchstitches!
And finally, here’s a shot of the shell body. I couldn’t see any centre front markings on the pattern, annoyingly, so I’m not sure yet how I’m going to handle the closure. I’ve got two button contenders (big black plastic vs smaller pale purple) or I might use concealed snaps… I’ve also still got to handstitch the pocket flaps down so they don’t stick out like they are here, but otherwise the shell body is done.
Also, I got a nice warning from Nicky in the comments yesterday to check the collar in a mirror before I commit. She’s just made this coat and found the collar to be overly huge, so I’m going to do some mirror tests once I’ve attached the sleeves and pinned the collar in place!
One additional confession – I bought some fabric! It’s been a long time (since September, by my records), and I’ve been working hard at using up my stash, but I’m going to be sewing some running gear very soon (more on this later, as I’m really excited about it!), so I bought some supplies from Tia Knight on eBay (you may remember I got the viscose jersey for my DKNY Vogue top and skirt from her).
I bought:
- 3m of black supplex jersey for workout gear
- 3m of teal silk-touch lycra for workout muslins
- 3m of 19cm wide black scalloped lace for more Ruby Slips
- 2m of marl orange viscose jersey because I wanted something orange and she didn’t have orange pontiroma
The teal spandex is just to muslin my running “compression” tights (based on the scary Jalie skinsuit pattern), so that’s likely to be sewn first out of this batch!
PS: Anyone else besides Tracy and I taking the Morley College Pattern Magic 2 course this weekend? Speak up!