My Winter Coat Progress: Part 1

Other posts in this series: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

I’ve been wearing the same winter coat for the past 4 years.  Joe has been telling me that I should buy a new one for the past two winters already.  He even increased my budget this year and basically gave me the OK to get almost anything I want.  Unfortunately, buying a coat has always been an ordeal for me.  I have a petite frame with disproportionately small shoulders.  Its almost impossible to find a coat that doesn’t make me look like I’m swimming in it.  Even when I do find one that fits my frame, its usually more of a fashion piece and doesn’t have enough insulation to keep me warm. Frustrating…

So I finally caved in and decided to make my own.  I’ve been really into the whole military parka look that’s really popular right now, but I’m putting my own twist on the trend.  I plan to make mine out of felted wool, rather than the woven cotton that you usually see. I want to give it a slightly more dressed up look.  It will almost be a parka/duffle hybrid. This is a pretty monster project and I’ll be lucky if I can finish it before the winter over.  It’s such a big project that I’m not going to give a DIY tutorial. I think it is simply way too complicated to explain step by step, but I’ll show you my progress so far!

I’m not that experienced of a draper and I wanted some sort of guarantee that I wouldn’t waste my time/money on a coat that would end up not fitting me. So I decided that I would base my pattern on a coat that I already own (the one I’ve been wearing for four years). In the picture below you’ll see that I started pinning muslin to my old coat to create the pattern.  It’s only a guide and starting point though, I did change the design quite a bit.

Here’s my finished pattern (I might have revised or added to some of these pieces since I took this pic).  Creating the pattern took me one whole day off of work during Christmas time.

The next step was cutting the pattern out of the actual coat fabric, both the shell and the lining.

Once all of my fabric was cut out, I ironed on fusible interfacing for added structure to the parts that need it.  It wouldn’t hurt if it offered a little extra insulation too.

At this point I have devoted three full days of work to this coat with still nothing actually constructed.  I decided that I wanted to work on all of the detail work first, which tends to be the most time consuming.  I bought this great fur trim for the hood.  Mood sells strips of fur already finished with an edge of grosgrain ribbon. It’s also the perfect length for a hood.  I wanted to make my fur trim removable with snaps, so this was the most challenging part of constructing the hood.

I bought mini anorak snaps and a home snap setting kit. Normally professionals use a large press for setting snaps.  The Dritz kit is a little more crude and less clean, but it did the job just fine.

And that’s all I’ve done up to this point!  All of this took me about three and a half days.  In my next entry I’ll show you how far I’ve gotten with sewing the shell of the coat.