If you haven’t watched Heated Rivalry yet – what rock have you been living under?? If you didn’t spend Boxing Day at The Cottage, what were you even doing?? (No but seriously – it’s worth the hype! The first three episodes are Good, but the last three are Phenomenal IMHO. And don’t even get me started how “the gay hockey show” has one of the most nuanced and sensitive portrayals of autism I’ve ever seen on screen…)
In the second episode, Shane wears a white fluffy Team Canada fleece to the 2014 Sochi Olympics, and everyone’s been going crazy for it online, so much so that the actual Team Canada have said they’re looking into replicating it as merch for the actual upcoming Winter Olympics! Most folks online are purchasing a white fleece jacket and just sewing on some patches, but a) that would be too easy, and b) I’m way too picky to be buying clothing these days when I can sew it myself ten times better!
Thankfully, the show’s costume designer posted some photos of the front and back of the fleece which made my life far easier…
Instead of CANADA on the back though (as an American in London I get mistaken for Canadian enough as it is), I decided to have “Hollander 24” on the back (Shane’s surname and hockey number). I bought all the zips, fleece, patches, red binding, etc for it as well as some white ripstop nylon for the patch pocket and side pocket linings.
For the sewing pattern I used La Maison Victor “Vic Jacket” (RIP/OOP from their Men’s Special in 2018) but with the pockets of Fibre Mood “Raya”, since I already owned both of these magazines. I used La Maison Victor size L (men’s sizing) and Fibre Mood size 18/L. But this Wardrobe By Me pattern is a very close match if you want one (mind the reviews though?!!). 😬
The real star here is the white sherpa fleece I bought off of Amazon with some gift cards: I bought 2m of 150cm wide at £14/m. But not only did my 2m arrive as two separate 1m cuts (what the hell??) but they even arrived in separate boxes?! At least the quality is good – soft and fluffy and the backing is soft enough to not need a lining either. And it turned out I had no problem fitting this into two 1m cuts, with a fair bit leftover.
A friend asked how much this fleece cost in supplies and I was aghast to learn it was about £75 in total?! 😵💫 To be fair, almost all of that was paid in gift cards, and the patches were over half of that cost – though I’m sure you could get them cheaper if you live in a country with reasonable customs duties so you could source from abroad.
Since the maple leaf patches arrived a good week after everything else and I wanted to sew those on when the sleeves were still flat rather than navigating in a tube, it influenced the order of how I sewed this.
First, I made the zippered chest pocket out of white ripstop, then I inserted both zippered welt pockets, using the ripstop as the pocket linings. It takes a certain amount of madness to even attempt to sew zippered welts into thick fleece, but that ship sailed a long time ago (the good ship Hollanov, amirite??). And to be fair, using thin ripstop for the pocket linings helped reduce the bulk significantly.
Then I sewed the side seams, purely to give me a better idea of where to place the patches on the back. After giggling to myself that “Hollander” also spells out “Holla Nerd” (or “Hallo Nerd”!), I arranged the letters in a nice arc and ironed them in place.
Then I took the opportunity to zigzag stitch around the edges of all the patches, and I’m so glad I did! They look SOOO much better stitched down, like they’re part of the fabric rather than just hovering above the fleece pile.
I was stalled a bit while I waited for the maple leaf patches to arrive (turns out they were made on demand!? By Patchion which might also explain why they were £12 for both inc shipping). While I was awaiting the leaf patches I actually ended up sewing a whole sweatshirt (more on that soon), so it wasn’t entirely wasted time spent twiddling my thumbs…
Once the maple leaf patches arrived I could sew them onto the sleeves, then sew the sleeves & set them into the body and attach the collar. I chose to double up the collar so that it’s fleecey inside too, rather than bind the top edge as in the LMV pattern.
With the outside collar attached, I could attach the main separating zipper, then fold the inner collar over it and stitch again to get a nice top edge. I topstitched along the length of the zipper, and then basted in the ditch to keep the inner collar in place. Then I took some white 1cm FOE from my stash and bound the bottom hem edge and sleeve hems, pulling the elastic slightly as I sewed.
And finally I could switch to red thread to sew the zipper pulls and the red binding along the collar attachment seam! I’d bought red FOE for this because I wasn’t sure if I’d bind the sleeve edges in red rather than white, but it would’ve made my life easier to just use red ribbon for both tbh. My fleece doesn’t really stretch so the stretchiness of the FOE was just a hindrance in the end.
I found a cute graphic of two loons online that I vectorised and cut in black flock HTV with my Silhouette machine while I was cutting something else, so I had to add it into the back neck just for me!
But I looooove the final fleece so much! It’s super cosy and gets a lot of attention from other fans. But the fleece is also a magnet for hair and black cat fur and is still shedding tons of fluff despite pre-washing, so hopefully it’ll calm down soon.
You can watch Heated Rivalry on Crave in Canada, HBO Max in the USA (and a bunch of other countries), and Sky or NOW TV in the UK.