BUT – the coat came through like a trooper. Even with the high winds and cold, I was toasty warm outside on the sections where we had to walk for blocks and blocks (and there were several of those) – I was wearing a cotton knit turtleneck and a lightweight long sleeved wool sweater, heavy tights and slacks. I could not wear that coat inside of course (and the coat check room at the museum was overflowing out the hall) and had to carry it around (which made things sort of onerous because that coat weighs a LOT). So, I feel thoroughly justified in 1) making the coat longer than knee length, 2) interlining it with the shrunken wool flannel and 3) using the heavy-duty flannelized coat lining.
(image at the top courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

And we’re in a rush to leave and I run out the door and twist around because I realize I have not done the little locking button thingy. And I turn around to shut the door and….

Snag. I’m caught. Big time. And I try to back myself out of it, and people are yelling from the car, etc. etc. And some bright-eyed person in the back of the car offers up, “Hey, Mom – you’ve got this big pull coming out of the back of your coat.”

Like, Aunt Toby didn’t know that. Every mom has eyes in the back of her head. I knew as soon as I felt I was caught that it was not going to ‘end well’ (as my dear old Mama used to say).

And for a moment, I again cursed the selection of the basketweave coating I’d gotten, but for another reason – unlike coating fabrics such as melton (which is sort of felted, actually), fabrics such as tweed, basketweave, boucle (think Chanel jackets – Coco was La Veritable Reine of loosely woven tweedy fabrics) are loosely woven enough that you can catch actual individual yarns in the weave and they can be pulled out.

And then what do you do?

Let’s look at two scenarios: The situation I had and the situation I’m glad I did not have but which I know how to deal with also.

My situation was that I had a pull, a big loop that stuck out of the fabric of the coat. I have a coat that is completely finished and lined, so it’s not as if I could work from the inside out (like with a pull on a sweater, for example). I had to work from the outside. And here is what I did:

First, taking a big honkin’ yarn needle (you DO have a couple of these, right? They have huge eyes and are really useful for sewing together pieces of sweaters, pulling loops into the inside of the sweater when you get snags, doing large needlepoint, etc.

Second, find the broken end of the pull (sigh – with woven fabric, the chances of NOT having a broken end with a pull are pretty small).

Taking your yarn needle, thread it with the broken end of the pull. The easiest way to get this into the eye of the needle is to fold over the fiber at the end, squeeze it really tight and push it through the eye(that’s one reason why you’ll need a yarn needle rather than just a ‘darning’ needle – get the biggest eye you can find).

Then, weave the point in and out in the place in the fabric where the yarn would have been if it had not been snagged and pulled out (over and under; match the weave of the yarns around your spot. With basket weave, it was pretty easy – if you are stuck with something like houndstooth or something more graphic, you will need to be a bit more clever, but at least you will have a model to work from so that the right colors end up in the right places). At the end, take the needle, bury the end of the yarn by putting the needle in the fabric and then at a little bit of distance away, pull it out. If there is any yarn still sticking out at that point, gently (!) pull the fabric of where you just did your re-weaving and the end should sink out of sight. If you are feeling a little bit nervous, then you can take a regular sewing needle with some thread that matches the fabric and carefully tack this yarn down along where you wove – little stitches – especially at the end. In general, this should be a good enough repair to carry you through.

Scenario Two: The whole darned yarn gets pulled out. Ouch. Basically, you will be doing the same reweaving project, but you will definitely need to do the last step with the needle and matching thread. The other thing is this – let’s say that in the snagging and pulling, you end up with a piece of yarn that is not really long enough or thick enough to fill in the spot.

Now, you have to do a little bit of ‘harvesting’ out of the inside hem of the coat. If you have a solid color coat, then you have a very good chance of finding what you need. Un-do the coat lining at the back bottom and pin it up so that you can get a good look at the hem. Hopefully, they have just tacked it and not glued it down with some sort of fusible. Un-do the edge and unravel some fibers along that bottom edge as long as you will need. That’s your new yarn. Then, tack the bottom hem back into the coat; tack back the lining and use the fiber to do your reweaving. If the bottom hem of the coat has been fused down, then you may be able to tease out one of the fibers lower down in the hem (usually it’s not the whole hem which has been fused down) and use that. Now, if you had made your coat (another reason to do home sewing), then you’d probably have a piece of the coating left over in your storage (which I do and which I now will hold onto for dear life, believe me) that you can use for harvesting.

Did the coat look like the art work on the front of the envelope? (does the finished garment EVER look like the art work on the front of the envelope?) In a general sense, yes, but I made two major changes: I wanted more flare, so I widened each piece below the waist. And I lengthened the coat because I’m going to be wearing it to walk to work … in Upstate New York. Also, because of the spongy nature of the fabric, I eliminated the pockets in the front and I’m not sorry I did that.

What changes did I make to the construction: All pieces of the fabric were fused with lightweight interfacing. I interfaced the fronts of the coat with hair canvas with an extra bias layer in the shoulders and across the yoke in the back. I interlined the entire coat (including the center 70% of the sleeves) with a light weight 100% wool flannel that I ran through the hottest water in my washer to shrink it. I put a large pocket in the lining of the coat. I eliminated the center seams in the back.

What changes would I make if I make this again? Well, I really like this coat – it comes with various cup sizes in the bust, which is really a great help in terms of getting it to fit correctly. I can see making this again in lighter weight fabrics. The changes I would make would be, first and foremost, that I would cut off the ‘facing’ on the front. It’s not big enough, so I didn’t really have enough to work with in terms of putting in the back buttonholes for the bound buttonholes in the front. I’d then draft a whole new facing for it and I’d also draft a back neck facing as well. Although I really like the basketweave wool that I used, it has a spongy texture that really does not take advantage of the pleats in the back. This design really requires a much lighter fabric – probably a heavy flannel would work but that would not make for a very warm coat.

Now, let’s get down to where the brass tacks meet the road: Did I save money by doing this? I’m going to stick out my neck here and say, “Yes” and here is why.
1) The inputs (without charging anything for my time) came to about $60.00. Could I have gone to a retailer and bought a coat for $60.00? Yes, with some looking, I could probably have found a coat. Would it have been 100% wool? No. Would it have had a wool interlining and heavy flannelized satin coat lining with an interior pocket? No. Would it have fit ME? (this is an unfair question to pose since I’m short and stumpy, and have short arms – the sleeves on even petite sized clothing is usually 2 inches too long on me) The answer continues to be “No”. Even if I could have found a coat for $60.00, I’d have had to either do alterations on it or taken it to a tailor to do alterations on it to make the sleeves fit me.
2) As I have discussed before, RTW coats, even the nicest I could afford to buy, are made badly, do not fit, and usually have sleazy, cheap acetate linings that shred out..sometimes in less than a year’s wearing. Since a lining is very much ‘the business end’ of a coat, once a lining goes, you must replace the lining. This raises the ‘lifetime wearing cost’ of a garment tremendously if you have to take it to a tailor to do this. Yes, I have the skills to replace a lining in a coat, but why should I have to invest my time and money to make up for the manufacturer cheapening the goods like this? Buying a coat and then having to invest in a new lining a year later is false economy. The difference in the cost between regular lining and heavy duty lining was about $2.00 a yard and the heavier lining will keep me warmer and will last for years.
3) One of the reasons linings shred out so quickly is that the manufacturing process usually works this way in terms of the lining: They make the body minus the sleeves. A separate operation makes the sleeves. The lining body is inserted into the coat (usually by bagging) and then the sleeve lining is inserted into the sleeves at the hem end; the lining is flipped and pulled through the outer sleeve and after the sleeve itself is inserted into the body of the coat, the seam allowance of the sleeve lining is folded under and slip stitched over the armscye seam. The number of coats that I’ve owned where this operation has resulted in total lining seam failure has been…almost 100%. Although a lot of the issue is the failure on the part of acetate as a fiber, the technique used in putting in the linings speeds up the shredding and tearing at this area of the coat. I made the lining complete – with the lining sleeves inserted in the body of the lining. And then I inserted the lining into the coat by hand, invisibly stitching it to the seam where the collar meets the coat (because there was no back facing) and down each side of the front facings. I also stitched it through the shoulder seams and the shoulder pads to connect it there and at the sleeve hems and at the bottom hem. I did not fasten it to the armscyes since that is the point of failure.

And how do I stitch ‘invisibly’? Once I have the lining pinned into the body of the coat (and I use various ‘landmarks’ to do this to make things like the side seams, the armscye, the yoke in the back the center of the neck and so on to line up. I also put a pleat or fold into the lining at the center back/center neck), I start at the center of the back of the neck and stitch where the edge of the lining meets the edge of the body material. I put the needle into the exact spot where the thread came out with the stitch before. I’m also holding my hand underneath the body of the coat in that spot and make sure that the needles doesn’t come out to the surface of the outer fabric. So, I go in one direction from the center neck out to one edge of the front. Then I go back to the center neck and stitch out to the edge of the other front. Then, I go back to where the folded lining edge meets the facing (and making sure I have a little bit of play in the lining fabric here – if you make the lining tight, you’ll just rip it out when you wear the coat) and stitch down from that upper edge down toward the bottom edge. Then I go back to the other front and do the same – again, I always start at the top and work to the outside; then I start at the outside edges and work down. Sometimes this is awkward but you want to always go in the same directions and since the last act for this will be taking up the bottom hem and then attaching the lining to that, you will want all the stitching lines and pressure to go down in that direction. The last task then is to take up the bottom hem of the outside fabric (if you have not done this already), steam press that down and stitch that down (usually done with a cross-hatch across the edge and into the body of the coat – also done invisibly). Then, leave the coat to hand overnight and then take up the hem. Again, I like to leave about 1/2 inch of play in the lining when I stitch it to the bottom hem so that it is not too tight when I put the coat on.

There are certain things that make garments look much more expensive than they might be:
Color: Black, dark gray, brown, navy and camel are luxurious colors. Purple, scarlet, turquoise, and lime green are not. Trust me on this. If you are going to go to the trouble of making something like a coat (which is going to cost some real money because good coating costs – but it’s like that thing from “Moonstruck” – “It costs money because it saves money”), although deep in your heart of hearts what you want is a coat that is going to cheer you up on those cold gloomy mornings, stick with something in the first set of colors. A coat in National School Bus Chrome Yellow might put your eyelids into permanent ’stapled to your eyebrows’ status, but it will get dirty fast, spend a lot of time at the cleaners, and look grubby no matter what you do. Making a coat is a lot of effort; you want to get as many seasons wear out of it as you can. Use things like hats, gloves, and scarves to get that trendy splash of color.

Length: Mini coats are very foxy. No doubt about it. But the very same shape and color of coat will look much more classy and luxurious if it is at least knee length and if it’s three inches longer than that – killer.

Accoutrements: by this , I mean the little decorative details such as a belt with a buckle; buttons, tabs, epaulets, and so on. The more of this chiffon-oria that you have on a coat, the more limited it is. Shiny gold buttons, tabs, epaulets and a belt and you’ve got a coat that people are going to assume spent some part of its life in the military. This sort of stuff is like spice – just a dusting goes a very long way. If you want the belt and buckle to be the attention getter, then don’t put on epaulets and shiny metallic buttons. Think of them as jewelry for the coat. Just pick one thing. On the other hand, you can build in a lot of lovely things if they all match the coat itself. See: welt pockets, bound buttonholes, lovely matching buttons (even self-covered! woohoo!). These all make the coat look mucho-lux.

Technique: My mom was a fearless sewer. I have memories of her making us all sorts of things when my sister and I were kids. She was very creative – I recall her recycling a bunch of tartan wool skirts as the lining in a duffle coat for my sister. Great stuff. But in my mind’s eye, I also have memories of the way she sewed and what she wanted was to put out as much in the way of clothing as she could cram into her sewing time. I don’t recall ever seeing her do something by hand, for example. She never made a muslin for anything (being 5′10″ and thin helped a lot). When I came home from sewing classes in high school, to do all my home work on the hair canvas and so on, she goggled at all the handwork and I remember her saying, “I’d never do any of that; you can make a jacket without doing all of that.”

And she’s right – you CAN, but it might not come out looking the way you want it to. Part of the reason people sew is that they want the sort of thing that they see in photos or movies or tv but that they can’t get where they live or that they can’t afford. They already have an idea in their heads what the outcome is going to be and trust me – the only way to have things come out that way is to spend a bit of time learning technique. Now, technique is useless if you can’t make it fit. A lot of lovely technically beautiful things hang in closets all over America and are never worn because they don’t fit. So learning to make and fit a muslin on yourself is definitely worth learning to do. But on the other side, if you don’t know some technique, you can have something that fits you but does not hang correctly and doesn’t look like the picture in your mind’s eye.

So, here are some basic things that you will need to know how to do to make a coat(and a lot of this goes for sewing other things as well, so they are worthwhile learning).
Steam pressing (aka ‘ironing’). An electric iron that can put out a whole lot of steam is the sewist’s friend. There are all sorts of good heavy irons out there. A good solid ironing board is worth having also. Whatever pad the cover comes with, find an old wool blanket and use that under the cover instead. it will hold the moisture and the warmth and pads the ironing board in a far more satisfactory way. Pressing cloth. Get at least one and use it religiously. With practice doing steam pressing, you will be able to perform all sorts of little bits of magic at the ironing board, like shrinking the caps on sleeves just enough to smooth them into the armscye and so on. Animal based fibers (wool, mohair, cashmere, etc.) gobble up steam and allow you to mold things. Silk, and man made fibers, however, do not.

Hand Sewing. Do not look on this as drudgery. There are certain sewing activities that, although you can whip them off at the sewing machine in jig time with just you, your machine and some pins, come out with a much better result with the application of some hand sewing. One of them is putting in zippers (especially if you are doing in vintage style in the side seam). Another is setting in collars and lapels. Another is applying the interfacings and interlinings in various tailoring methods. A lot of people are married to the use of thimbles; I never have..and I have the scars on the ends of my fingers to answer for it.

Grading seams. When you are working with thicker materials, a seam takes up a lot of space. It makes a lump. You can steam press it all you want, but it’s still a lump. The best way to make the lump less..lumpy..is to grade it. This means that after you sew your seam, you take out your trusty shears and make one side of the seam (usually the side that will be on the top when you steam press it down) skinnier than the other side of the seam. Once you steam press it, they will lay on top of one another in a far less lumpy sort of way which makes the garment look much nicer and less ‘home ec class’ (my apologies to the rest of my compatriots in Mrs. Reynolds 7th period sewing class – especially to those of you who entered your ensembles in the “Make it With Wool” contest in 1969).

Admit you need help. The days when sewing classes of every sort were available in fabric stores seemingly everywhere are not the usual thing. However, the interest in sewing at a solid level and making challenging stuff has grown tremendously in the past 5 years so there are more and more classes out there. Just because your mom did not teach you how to sew at her knee does not mean that you cannot learn to make great stuff. The information is out there on the internet, in books, in workshops, on dvds. it’s amazing what is available. Just commit yourself to make one thing that you really want. That is usually NOT aprons, tote bags, or pillows. If what you want to make is a coat for your first project, then there is a coat pattern out there just for you. If you are brave of heart, there are tailoring videos and books out there to help, though I think finding a sewing class is a great way to learn and make some sewing buddies as well (and sewing buddies are great to have). But the point is to admit that you need help and get out there and find it rather than dream about making something … and never getting around to it.

So..until the next time.

Which Aunt Toby feels is a real mistake. This is the same sort of thinking that manufacturers use when they make linings out of the sleaziest, cheapest junk that splits at the seams, frays out and cheapens the product immensely. Linings perform several functions, most of them very important and so making a lining for anything deserves some real thought and attention.

Linings Do The Following:
Make the garment warmer
Protect the garment from body sweat and other, ahem, things
Provide more structure for the garment
Help keep the garment in good shape for a longer life

The other thing that a lining can do, if you think about it, is that it provides an entirely separate version of the outer garment and this allows the sewist to think about doing things that the outer garment might not be able to do. My favorite thing to do with a lining is to build one or more pockets into it. Now, sometimes, this is for sheer convenience as in an evening skirt or jacket when I don’t want to have to lug around a purse with me. Aunt Toby hates trying to juggle a glass of wine in one hand, a small plate of something in the other hand and a purse underneath my arm when I’m at a cocktail party or reception. I will not count the number of disastrous events where I ended up wearing what was on that plate instead of eating it. With an inner pocket in the skirt or jacket, I can slip in my cell phone, the electronic thingy for the car, and a charge card and I’m good to go. I’m not one for hauling out a bag of cosmetics mid-event to redo “ma maquillage”, so a pocket like this is really helpful. Another helpful pocket in a jacket or coat is one that you can zip closed to keep something like a passport in. I hate scrabbling around in my purse for my passport – men’s jackets always have inner breast pockets for handy things like that but women’s jackets never do, so I put something in every time.

In the case of the coat, I made the conscious decision NOT to put pockets into the outer garment. The fabric is so spongy and soft and stretchy that my fear was that if I tried to do anything other than a ‘sew on the outside’ patch pocket (which I felt stylistically would really be disastrous), I would end up with a pocket that once I put my hand into it once, or stuffed a pair of gloves into it, it would stretch out, gape, and make the whole coat look awful. And since this is a dressy coat, I don’t want it to ever look that way. So, my resolution to the problem was to accept the fact that I won’t be able to jam my hands into my pockets (no great sacrifice there – just another excuse to wear a nice pair of leather gloves) and build a pocket into the lining so that once I took off my coat, I could slip the gloves and/or hat in there and they’d be safe, wouldn’t end up on the floor and so on.

Here’s how I did it. If you get nothing more out of this than remembering that you need to make the decision of ‘What do I want to do with the lining?” before you actually put the lining into the coat, then I’ll have done my job here. You can perform this bit of magic right up to the point where you install the lining, though if you do it right from the get-go as I’m doing, it will go a lot easier.

Materials and tools:
Fabric for the welt and the pocket. In my case, I used the same fabric that I’m using to make the bound buttonholes in the outside of the coat, which is a brown poly shantung. It’s heavier than lining fabric but not as heavy as my super-duper Haberman Fabrics flannelized coat lining. For the welt, you’ll need a piece of fabric 8.5” long by 5” wide. For the pocket, you’ll need a piece about 9” by 11”. Cut both on the straight grain of the fabric.
Tools: small straight edge ruler, pencil, sharp pointed scissors, pins, iron and ironing surface of some sort.

Step one – decide which side of the coat you want to put the pocket (or decide you want them on both sides). Hold up that piece of the lining against you, right side TOWARD you (because that’s what will happen at the end when the lining is installed into the garment). Put a pin where you’d like the opening to be. Lay the fabric piece flat and put a little scrap of paper where you’d like the opening and play around a bit in terms of the angle on the fabric. Mark the ends of what will be the opening with two pins in the lining piece – the opening should be something in the 6″-7″ range so that you can get your whole hand in there.

Step two – What I’m doing with this is making a version of a welted pocket. Instructions for doing that are here Buttonhole and Welt.
I’m doing my own rather ham-fisted version of this. Please take note – it is worth while making practice versions of this a bunch of times and in different sizes because this technique also makes, if you make a much smaller version, bound buttonholes. Being able to do this is a very nice skills addition to one’s sewing lexicon because bound buttonholes make anything look lovely, expensive and elegant. OK..back to step two. Take the smaller piece of fabric and center that over the marking pins and pin down all around. You should have an inch of fabric between the edge of the fabric and the pins. Pin all around the edges of this piece. Flip the lining piece over and eyeball the center of the little pinned down piece of fabric and draw a straight line through that, stopping just short of the original marking pins. Using your basting stitch (machine or hand), stitch on that line.

Step three – Using your straight edge and the pencil, draw a line with the basted stitched in the center, that is about ½ inch across the top and bottom (so that stitching will be at the ¼” point). See the box in the photograph. Then line up the ends to make a box. Pin through those lines and using a small straight stitch, go around the box. Take out the pins and using your sharp scissors, cut straight up the stitching, stopping just short of either of the short ends. Cut into the corners. Take out all the pins. Go to the iron. Taking the long stitched sides of either side of the box, pull up the fabric and pull against the stitching, ironing it down against the stitching until there is a crisp crease there. Do the same with the short ends of the box. Don’t leave the iron – you need it for step four also.

Step four – Pull the fabric through the cut you made and flip to the other side. Pin down against the cut edges and iron again, both sides . Then, fold under the edges of the fabric all around, pin and iron again. Baste around the edges. Remove all the pins. With the sewing machine, sew down close to the basting stitches around the edges. Remove the basting stitches.

Step five – Take the larger piece of pocket fabric and iron down ½” all the way around and sew down. Pin on the back of the lining piece, arranging it in such a way that the bound opening (the welt you just made) is close to the top. Mark the edges with pins (and baste down too if you like) and sew all around. Voila – pocket with a welted opening. If you want an welted opening with a zipper, then you will need to make the welt and center the zip underneath it and then sew around the zipper tape from the front. It is not the most elegant technique but it does work. Then, you put the pocket on the back.

Now that I’ve managed to use a morning to avoid putting in all the bound buttonholes in the coat, I’ll have to get back to that.

Until the next time.

Which is why this coat, once I really got cranking on it, has taken soooooo long. The fabric is, ahem, shall we say, not exactly wind proof. Which meant that I absolutely had to not only put some sort of fusible interfacing on it to hold it together and perhaps seal it up a little bit, I had to also interline it. I chose thinnish wool flannel (which I got from fabric mart), which I ran through the hottest water in my washer and steam pressed to shrink the heck out of it. And I’ve also gotten some wonderful heavy flannelized lining from Haberman Fabrics to line it.

This coat is going to weigh a ton.

There are a lot of other sewists out there who have made and are currently making coats. There is a level of expertise out there that is truly astonishing – having this available is one of the fantastic benefits of sewing on the web. As usual, however, your dear Aunty has decided to stumble through this activity, with nods here and there to what I think are the best ideas that I can use.

1) Modifications to the pattern. As you can see from the diagram, both the upper yoke and the back bottom of the coat have center seams. I took out the center back seams on the upper yoke and the back ‘skirt’ of the coat. The only reason I can see for having a back seam is to put a kick pleat in the coat and since this is a swing back, I did not see the need for it. Second, when you interline a coat, as you can see from the pieces in the photos, you have to sew the interlining just UP TO the seamline. Eliminating the center back seam eliminated some hand sewing. Yes, Aunt Toby has a major laziness factor to struggle against – and sometimes, laziness wins.
2) Modifications to the technique. Another way to deal with the whole ‘interlining to the seam’ business is to …ignore that. In the front of the pattern, there is a princess seam going from the shoulder down to the bottom. Not wanting any MORE bulk in the (ahem) front, I sewed the side and center front pieces together, steam pressed the heck out of them, put in the hair canvas pieces by hand and then used this complete unit as the pattern for the interlining piece, trimming off the center front edges . Yes, I had to catch stitch the interlining along the princess seam, but this did eliminate some hand sewing. In the photograph, you will see a piece of yellow paper with a grainline arrow on it – this is my coy method of letting you know that under that interlining is not only one layer of hair canvas there, but two, with the second piece in that shape of the yellow piece of paper. This is, in men’s tailoring, called ‘the chest piece’ and in men’s tailored coats and jackets, this supports the area of the anatomy between the shoulders and the widest part of the chest, which without some support would actually collapse. In formally tailored garments, they even pad that area. What I did was cut a chest piece on the bias grain (thank you Tailoring) and then I fused it to the already sewn in hair canvas using fusible web (see, I told you I was lazy).
3) Sleeve interlining. Some books advocate only interlining the top section of the sleeve, but I felt that with the outer fabric being so ‘air-conditioned’, I would be sorry if I did not get some interlining into that sleeve, especially on the outside. So, that’s what I did. As you can see from the photo, it is not only interlined, but also has a muslin ‘stay’ (thank you Erica Bunker) in it as well. Erika would have put a muslin stay in the yoke but I figured that the hair canvas being sewn right to the coat fabric was ‘stay’ enough.

The back is done. I sewed down the pleats and steam pressed them separately from the rest of the back. The fronts are done, as are the sleeves.

Next up? Attach the fronts to the back and then…

(Cue scary organ music)

Putting in the sleeves.

Until the next time….

Part of it is the price of the materials. I won’t be delusional about it. Good coating costs real money – and it’s not something you can find at your local ‘national craft store masquerading as a fabric store’ chain place. A lot of people who sew love beautiful fabric but don’t want to cut into it for fear of making a mistake. That’s why making a muslin is so important – if the muslin fits, then the item you make in the ‘real stuff’ will fit too. That is what it is for – to work out all the bugs before you cut into the coat fabric.

There’s also the ‘Oh, how can I handle this big, heavy thing’ aspect. When you work with wool (or any of the animal based fibers), you are looking for weight. Let’s not fool ourselves – when it comes to animal based fibers (wool, mohair, cashmere etc.), weight equals warmth. And the reason for that is because the reason this stuff is warm is that the fibers have scales (they are hair, after all) and those scales trap warm air next to us and help to keep us warm. The more scales you’ve got surrounding you, the warmer you are. To get a lot of scales, you need lots and lots of fiber — and that means weight. I realize that there are people out there that are devoted to wearing goose down coats – bless you for giving new homes to all those feathers and undercoats of birds. But I look like Bibendum (which is the name of the mascot of the Michelin Tire Company) wearing a down coat. Down is really not something you can actually tailor close to your body without losing a lot of the benefits. Down provides warmth through puffiness — Aunt Toby does not DO puffiness.

And then there is the whole ‘good wool coat’ thing – which is emotional, really. I was brought up with them and tried to foist them onto my kids as well. I’ve tried to get the DH to buy himself a black topcoat for 30+ years; the best I could arrange was a lined trench. Sigh.

From a plain old ordinary ’sew the seams together’ aspect, if you can sew a dress or a shirt and get the sleeves in properly, you can make a coat. They basically require the same technical proficiency at the sewing machine. Take a look at two different diagrams. One is a dress and one is a coat.

Both of these have common elements: set in sleeves, seams, buttons up the front. The only difference, really is that one of them is made with thicker fabric and is going to use different weights of interfacing on the lapels and fronts. If you don’t want to use sew-in interfacing on the coat, there are really good fusibles now on the market that you can use.

Another thing about animal based fibers like wool – you cannot burn them. It’s not like making a dress or blouse out of petroleum based fabrics like polyester or something like silk, where the wrong temperature on the iron and you are looking at basically a total loss. Wool is actually fire-resistent (which is why hotels and other public places use it in upholstery and rugs – even if you threw a can of gasoline and match out there, the fibers would smoulder for a very long time and would not catch fire). So, as long as you press with a moist cloth, all that is going to happen is that you will steam the heck out of it (which is a great thing for shrinking stuff into spots that they might not want to go into smoothly) and raise a smell like a wet dog.

No problems there.

So, how to conquer your Fear of the Coat?
1) Look at your skills at the cutting and sewing. If you can make a button down the front shirt and do a good job putting on a collar and setting in the sleeves, a coat is no issue for you. If you can do the sleeves, but the collar is not so good – then look for a coat with no lapels like this one, Vogue 8520: A coat such as this one is going to depend on good heavy coating. There are not even buttonholes to drive you nuts, either. A great first coat and in a good basic color like black, grey, tan, brown, dark blue, or dark grey, you can jazz it up with long leather gloves, scarves, and even do a little Michelle Obama thing and put a brooch at the neck.

2) If you have or can find an old coat at the Salvation Army or Goodwill, take it apart and see what they did. They’ve interfaced the edges of the front, the bottom hem and the bottoms of the sleeves. With iron-on interfacing, you can do that too. They put shoulder pads in – that’s not a hard thing (fold ‘em in half, line up the half-way marks on the shoulder seams, pin them in so the non-curved edges extend out about a 1/2 inch from the shoulder seam and baste them in through the shoulder seam with thread to match the coat fabri)c.

3) Lining. Is it Fear of the Coat? Or is it “How the heck do I put in a lining?” Ah — there are as many techniques on putting in a lining as there are sewists, I think. There are books on putting in linings. There are classes on putting in linings. Aunt Toby was taught how to bag a lining in her high school sewing course, lo these many years ago…and I still end up making the entire lining (which is basically like making the coat over again, only in lining fabric), sticking the lining sleeves into the coat sleeves, tacking it in in spots, trying the coat on, twitching it a bit, and then sewing the lining into the facings with her teeny tiny annoying hand stitches. Invest in a good tailoring book. Here is a great list of books for a sewing library: Erica Bunker’s Sewing Library
Here is also a complete site devoted to a coat sew-a-long: Coat Sew-a-long
If you are a devotee of sewing blogs (and there are many many wonderful ones out there), many of the bloggers have made coats over the past year – ideas a-plenty.

Trust me – this IS something you can do. And because you are going to pick good quality coating and good quality lining (heavy satin, preferably with a flannelized back if you can find it) and do a good job sewing it up, you are going to have a coat which will last you for years, will not fall apart, that you won’t have to reline after one year’s wear, and that you can be proud of. Oh, and it will cost you less than anything even approaching it in quality from the department store. And THAT, is a good thing.

Here are some of my favorite sources for stuff for coats:
Fabricmart
Gorgeous Fabrics
Fashion Fabrics Club

If you live in or near a place such as Philadelphia or New York, you have your own districts for fabrics — go, visit, and get the actual feel of good coating. You want something that is dense, heavy, as close to 100% wool as you can get it (or wool and cashmere or wool and mohair, etc.).

And don’t forget – buy the lining, the interfacings, etc. all at the same time you get the coating so that you can get lining that matches. Ask for ‘coat lining’ and don’t accept anything less than super heavy satin faced polyester. Do NOT buy acetate. It’s sleazy; it’s cheap and you will have to line the coat again one year from when you finish it. It is one of the ways coat manufacturers cheapen the product (to maximize their profits) and it is, as far as I am concerned, cheating the consumer. Don’t cheat yourself – make the coat to keep you warm and make it to last.

But don’t be afraid.
(photo at the top courtesy of The Wisconsin Historical Society)

The Little Corporal may never have picked up a pair of scissors and a needle in his career (actually, I’ll bet he did – everyone knew how to sew a seam and darn a sock in those days), but he did know about always moving forward.

And moving forward I needed to do because a) it’s getting colder all the time (isn’t that a Beatles song?) and b) that brown basketweave wool was just sitting there, glaring at me, filling me with despair. I had a new pattern, the Vogue 8626 and had been clutched by ‘fear of doing another muslin’. What if it didn’t work? What if this one looked as bad as the last one? What if it looked (gasp) worse? But desperation is a rather pointy master, so I took my measurements, made the basic changes, cut out the pattern top in some left over curtain material I had, sewed it up, realized, as usual I had the ‘armscye too low – what the heck’ issue and did my traditional ‘eye-shaped gusset’.

Ah…..veddy niiize….

And then Aunt Toby Realized that I never showed you what I have to do once the lightbulb goes on, all the stars align and I dance a little jig in front of the mirror (that’s the clue that ‘by George, she’s got it!” in terms of the pattern actually making it to the final garment stage).

First, I oh-so-carefully cut the shoulder seam and take out the basting on the sleeve from the center top down both sides to where the corners of the gusset are and laying it out flat, I cut straight across the gusset.

Second, I take apart the side seam up to where the gusset is attached. I draw a line straight up the middle, matching the edges of the side pieces and cut along that line.

Third, I take apart the underarm seam from the sleeve up to where the gusset is attached THERE, draw a line straight up the middle, matching the edges and cut along that line.

I iron these out flat and survey the damage. The little gusset pieces, as you can see from the photograph, don’t come to the edges and are rather, ahem, herky-jerky in terms of meeting the curves, so I need to ‘true these up, which I do by attaching pieces of paper (in this case, paper towels because they are white and it shows up better), redrawing the straight or curved lines.

Then I take these new trued-up pieces, put the pattern pieces on top of them and make the changes there.
Ready to rock and roll with the basketweave fabric, except first, I have to fuse it.

Now, when Aunt Toby was a much younger Munchkin, back during the days when high school girls could not wear slacks to school, shop and mechanical drawing were for boys and girls got — Home Ec, we did not ‘fuse’. Fusing, per se, did not exist for home sewers. Iron-on interfacing had only recently been invented; they were still working out the bugs in terms of the adhesives – did you wash it? Didn’t you wash it? Sew-in interfacings were the norm, and actually until ’speed tailoring’ and Georgio Armani came on the scene in the 80s, clothing such as jackets and coats were made with sewn-in interfacings and this wonderful archaic product called ‘hair canvas’ because, interestingly enough, it has goat hair in it. It is the gold standard of ’stand up by itself’ interfacings and when Aunt Toby took ‘more sewing’ in high school (after a complete failure in the 7th grade), she made her very first jacket with assistance of the rather formidable Cornell-trained Home Economics teacher and hair canvas, which was attached to the underside of the front of the jacket in several different places, in different conformations, with something referred to as ‘pad stitching’. All terribly British, uptight, and formal.

That was a jacket I wore for a long time, though not as long as I could have if I’d chosen a different color than baby blue. But, I digress. Home sewing has gotten a lot more sophisticated in the past 30 years — people not only want things that look like what they could get in the store (and a store such as Barneys if they could afford it), they want something that actually looks better. When I was young, no sewing adult I ever met went to workshops, bought books, took classes in sewing. Now they are everywhere and the internet and sewing blogs are just filled with useful and inspiring information from sewers who produce clothing that frankly makes you gasp with delight. Aunt Toby started sewing when she was 10 and believe me, I’m a better and more clever maker of clothing today than I ever was 30 years ago..or even 10 years ago. Learning all the damn time.

And one of the very clever techniques I’ve come upon is this thing called ‘fusing’, which is basically taking a very light weight iron-on interfacing and with heat, fusing or gluing if you will, this to the entire back of the pieces of fabric. What this does (and this is an entirely separate operation from actually putting interfacing into their requisite areas on a garment) is provide some stability and support for the fabric. Now, there are all sorts of wool fabrics that can be used for winter coats, such as melton and heavy weight flannels and so on. The basketweave wool I got was heavy – but also loosely woven – so I knew that I needed to a) stabilize it and b)try to make it a bit more wind-proof.

Some sewists do what is referred to as ‘block fusing’, where basically either they take it to a service, which uses huge heated presses to lay interfacing on the back of the cloth and fuse the two layers together with heat and/or steam. At home, this can be done on an ironing board but I prefer something a little bit more labor intensive. I cut out the pieces of the coat and fuse each piece separately, using a wool blanket, a bath towel and my home iron. I felt that if I draped the fabric over the ironing board, it might stretch out of shape, so I put the blanket and the towel on the carpet and worked there on the floor.

It’s not always easy to know what temperature to put the iron on, in order to get a good attachment from the adhesive – many of these lightweight fusible interfacings are really made for knits and so doing a test with a scrap of your interfacing and a scrap of your fabric is really necessary. I was surprised at how high a temperature I needed in order to get any adhesion at all, but in order to prevent the backer of the fusible from melting, I had to keep my iron moving constantly. I laid down the fusible on the towel, adhesive side up (and you can tell that by feel) and laid the pieces of the coat right side up. I first tried to get the fusible to adhere by putting down a linen towel and steam ironing through that but that did not work, so I cut around each piece of the coat through the fusible, flipped the sandwich over and ironed straight through the fusible by pressing down and moving my iron. This worked really well and I got great adhesion of the fusible on the back side of the wool while at the same time, because the right side of the coat pieces were on top of the towel which was on top of a wool blanket, the wool fabric did not get mushed down.

My next step is interlining the pieces. Right now, I’m thinking seriously of using cotton flannel (though, I’m goign to have to wash and dry it in a hot dryer first to pre-shrink it). What I’ll be doing is cutting out each piece of the coat, again (this is a serious project, believe me), attaching each piece of cut flannel to its corresponding piece of fused wool and then when I sew up the coat, treating this sandwich as one piece.

Until the next time….

Pit stop on the muslin
First Fix
Armscye
Choosing the right pattern

and still feel like this:

Sheesh. One of the only advantages to retail is that you go to the store and either they have what you want..or they don’t. And if they have it, it fits..or it doesn’t. You don’t have to go through all of this agony. But if you need a coat (which your Aunt Toby desperately does) and you can’t find one you like or you can’t find one that fits (ditto, ditto), then agony it is.

And sometimes, that means throwing in the towel on a muslin, heaving a nuclear powered sigh and trudging off with the knowledge that sometimes, what you want is just the IDEA of a swing coat..not a swing coat itself. No matter how I twitched, slumped, stood hyper-erect, put my hands on my hips, posed in my best supermodel ‘one toe pointed in the front at 90-degree angle’, that green muslin…just..did..not..look…good.

As a matter of fact, as my late lamented Ma used to put it (which of course makes her your Great-aunt Ma), that muslin made me look like ‘a bag tied up ugly’ (my Ma was very sensitive like that). So, off with it’s thread (As the Cher Bonne Marie Burns would say) and back to square one..again. And part of that was analyzing just what it was that I truly hated about that muslin (the coat to be – because let me tell you, the final product does tend to look amazingly like the muslin so if it’s ugly at the muslin stage, it will NOT look like Oscar de la Renta in the final stage. If it does not fit and flatter in the muslin, it will definitely not do so at the end. No matter how wonderful a sewist someone is, no matter how technically proficient – it might be the most gorgeous thing on a hanger or on the dress dummy but it will not look good on you).

What I hated (check out any of those links above): It just hung there. Like a green waterfall. Did zip for me. Now, I am not a delusional person – your Aunt Toby is quite content with what’s left of my shape after three kids, three major abdominal surgeries, and rather intermittent weight lifting, bike riding and livestock care. There are parts of me that stick out most alarmingly and there are parts that curve in as well. Throwing what amounted to a green couch cover on myself, even one that fit me in the bust line, and sticking in a set of rather pneumatic shoulder pads, resulted in my letting that muslin sit on my dressmakers form for a very long time.

And when I do that, I know, down in my socks, that I really and truly hate the thing. And I knew that I needed a pattern for a coat that went out where I needed it to go out and in where I needed it to go in, and hopefully had a part toward the bottom that swung out a bit so that my psychological need for that would be satisfied. And I think I found it — Vogue 8626.

Princess seams all the way down the front and in the upper half in the back. A nice swingy pleat in the back. Pockets and a neat snug collar. Looks promising.

(photos courtesy of: toadiepoo)

Like many processes in sewing, this one really works better with the help of a second person so that you can point with a finger where you want the pins to be inserted on the muslin. With the assistance of my helper (ahem, the DH, ahem) , I marked the spot where (the top bow) my arm meets the top of my chest and (the bottom bow) where my armpit is, both in relation to the sleeve front seam. My helpful assistant marked the same two places on the back sleeve seam. As you can see from the distance between the bottom bow and the bottom of the sleeve and where the sleeve meets the body of the coat, that’s WAY too low. How to bridge the gap?

I have had horrible luck with redrafting patterns and getting the whole ‘where the armpit meets the road’ spots to line up correctly, but I have had pretty decent luck using something that is frankly a pretty low-tech and traditional clothing design feature: a gusset. Gussets come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and are a standard feature of items with Dolman, kimono and other non-set-in sleeve designs to provide wearing ease and movement. Gusset

The way I use a gusset is this: In the muslin-fixing phase, I’ll open up the underarm seam between the points that I’ve marked where my arm meets my body (in the other photo, it’s the top red bow), both front and back. I pick up the sleeve and pin it so that I have a flat surface to work with.

Measuring the gap that is created, I take a piece of fabric and make an eye-shaped gusset that is slightly larger than the hole. In this case, the gap was about 7″ x 7″.

Pinning the fabric under the hole like a patch, I’ve bridged the gap. Here is how I fix the muslin with this: Opening up the seam where the sleeve front and back come together and the side seams, I split the gusset vertically up the center. Then, with a pen or marker and using the other seam lines, I create the new horizontal lines and cut along those. Then, when I take the muslin apart to put all of my changes on the paper pattern pieces, I have the new, raised armscye, nice and flat to use to change the paper pattern.

Of course, because I’ve divided up this added fabric into four separate places, it’s no longer a gusset when I actually make the garment – but it fits under the arm as if I did have a gusset there.