With the Burda/Armani coat firmly OFF my list for my winter coat (a few of you suggested I could change/fix/alter the pattern but sorry, my time is too valuable to throw after a bad pattern. I know when to cut my losses and choose a better one!), I’m now in the process of picking a different winter coat pattern for my luscious and very thick ex-Burberry wool coating.
Since I scan all of the “At-a-glance” pages for my pattern magazines and store these in a private online gallery, looking through these and creating a shortlist is much, much easier than wading through each and every one of my magazines! I went through the gallery, and when I found a coat pattern I quite liked, I took a small screenshot of it (on Macs you can Shift-Apple-4 to draw a small square and only capture just that area), and renamed the screenshot to the pattern issue and number so I wouldn’t forget where it came from. Then I pasted all these into one big image so I can see all my choices at once.
This is the same process I used to narrow down my wedding gown pattern shortlist, but I cleaned the collage up a bit nicer in Photoshop this time around!
(click to see it bigger)
There’s a lot of variation here, but no one pattern or silhouette is really sticking out for me right now. I’ve already got a super-warm interlined coat for those darkest, coldest, windiest days, and a hooded coat for rainy and windy days, so I don’t necessarily need this one to be either of these things. What I definitely do need, though, are pockets I can jam my hands in while I walk (ones that open vertically are much better than those which open from the top), so any here with patch pockets must have a seam I can put an inseam pocket into…
Unlike some women, I really have no problem with double breasted designs, and I’m not bothered whether the opening is concealed, zippered, or buttoned. But my fabric is very heavyweight so it’s probably best to not have too many pleats or gathers to avoid bulky seams.
Has anyone got a favourite from my shortlist? Are there any you think definitely wouldn’t work for my figure or style? Or maybe you’ve made one of these and you can give me the thumbs up or down?
Realistically, I probably won’t start on this until the Christmas break, as I’ve got quite a lot of gifts to sew in the meantime, plus some quite urgently-need skylight covers for the captain’s cabin of the boat, in addition to some fun sewing for me this weekend. But I like to keep my mind a few steps ahead of my sewing room so I want to start planning now, and I’ll need to purchase shoulder pads, sleevehead, plus any haberdashery and linings before I can make this, too.