Ok, I am so done with this coat. I can’t even. It was half done when the store closed (it’s a shop project of course) and I totally lost steam and, well, blerg.
There’s nothing really wrong. The pattern is McCalls’ M7025. The fabric is a polyester coating printed with this gorgeous lace pattern. I am such a sucker for lace print! And a black to match. Neither are particularly great quality, and I’m dubious about how the print will hold up to wear as there’s a lot of white behind the thin surface printing.
I skipped the giant patch pockets.
The fit is good, if a little snug with all my interlining and stuff. I made the size 12 grading to a 10 only at the shoulders. (I raised it under the armpits a bit too much but that’s easy enough to adjust after the fact.) I thought the amount of length I added to the sleeves was completely ridiculous, but now that they’re on, they’re nearly perfect. My definition of perfect is probably an inch longer than normal people’s, but that’s the result of a lifetime of too-short sleeve trauma.
The bound buttonholes were a bit of an afterthought, and they’re not perfect, and I feel like they nearly killed me but actually it wasn’t that bad, just nerve wracking. Trying to do conventional buttonholes on a regular machine would’ve been even worse, though. And they look amazing so there’s that.
Oh, yeah, added braid piping between lining and facings.
And maybe I just didn’t have the energy for a really elaborate project. But I’ve been ogling this pattern since it came out and the red lace-printed coating was just too unique and perfect and, well, shop projects always seem like a good idea when you first take them out…
Anyway, it’s done now.
My favourite touch is the slotted seams I added along the princess lines, though it is hard to see in the photos.
I did a neat alteration to the back neck facing that I completely failed to photograph, too.
You can almost see it here… No, not really. Oh, the pattern has some separate lining pieces (yay!) but not all of them (aww) so the lining is supposed to have the extra seam partway down the skirt, too. I did not want that. It wasn’t too hard to overlap the edges of the two pieces to cut them as one.
Anything else to say? This make was so stretched out I’ve forgotten half of it. The sleeves are quite narrow at the upper arm, wide at the cuff. I do like the elbow dart for shaping though. Lots of sleeve cap ease. I chopped off a bunch.
Oh, yeah, I interlined with Thinsulate, body, upper skirt, and sleeves. Trimmed off the seam allowances and did butted seams on the body.
I must have miscalculated somewhere on what seam allowance I took off the front but otherwise that worked well for the bodice. I was a bit more stumped for the sleeves. (Incidentally, standard wisdoms for interlining seems to be “quilt it to the lining”. This probably works well, but I HATE QUILTED LININGS. They fill me with visions of really ugly early 80s parkas. Anyway, it’s really hard to sew a butted seam up a sleeve. Not impossible, but annoying enough that I spent several weeks avoiding it. In the end, I replaced the seam allowances I had cut off the edges of the Thinsulate with ugly flat bias tape zig-zagged on top so the bias tape stuck out past the edge of the Thinsulate, and underlined the coating fabric for the sleeves. This actually worked quite well, and I wish I’d gotten pictures but by this time I was in mad-last-minute-panic mode. Also you have to finish the edges of Thinsulate with a zig-zag at least, otherwise the outer layers shift and the inner fluff starts escaping.
It’s hanging in the shop now, finally. I will probably like it better by the time I get it back. It’s certainly very striking. I had been kinda hoping this would be the mythical “warmer than the winter coat” that I’ve been dreaming of for the past six or seven years, but I don’t think it’ll be quite there, alas. But at least I’ll look fabulous… 😂
My first thought was a version of view C with the hood, but after trying out the little flounce at the waist I decided to skip it. It’s cute in theory but a little too much ruffle right at the waist for my liking.
The fabric is a “wool blend” lightweight coating (or possibly a heavy flannel) that’s only 10% wool—eyeroll—but I sure do like the look. Plus the colour scheme will work really well (if boringly) with lots and lots of the other things that I have made. To make it a bit warmer, I underlined with some heavy flannel from stash, the same stuff that I used for the 
Running with the inspiration of the lace-bedecked original, I also got as much of this black cotton cluny lace as I could fit in the project budget.
And I had just enough to go to town, covering not only the front and back yokes, but getting bands at the hem, waist, and sleeve hems as well. With only the tiniest sliver to spare!
You might find this a bit unbelievable, but this is the only coat I have with a hood. It’s not quite big enough, from my point of view, to look good up, but it’s just right for wearing down. And I’m sure if I wear this far enough into the fall (assuming I can wear it, when the chips are down) I’ll test it out for warmth. At a certain point in the Canadian winter you give up on caring about what things look like.
Basically, I botched the plaid matching. Since it’s such a simple check, I guess I thought I could kinda wing it and, ah, no. Not a good idea. I should have spent much more time reviewing/researching. Or just thinking. Gah. All the different seam-lines (yoke, waist) didn’t help either.
And I stretched and eased and fudged and tweaked and made it work, kinda, but, there was a price, which was that I had to trim off some of the centre front bodice. And that I lost what had been a vertical stripe match from left side to right side, in order to match bodice and skirt. Maybe not the right call in hindsight, especially since this meant I also lost inches, where you don’t really want to lose inches in a fitted coat that I was already making down a size. Which means the whole damn thing is tight, bordering on way too tight. Not what I wanted in a brand new coat. And you can see the awkward pulling across the front, especially above the bust, where there just isn’t as much fabric as there should be.
Otherwise, I was pretty happy with my fit alterations. I started with a size 10 in the shoulders & bust, grading to a 12 at the waist, and squaring the shoulder down to the size 6 height. I did a petite through the armscye (but then forgot to take anything out of the sleeve cap, which led to a bit too much ease there, oops. My fabric was forgiving enough to accommodate it, but I wish I’d remembered in time to just trim it off. I’m glad I didn’t go with the straight 12 though as the shoulders are still a little boxy. I should have lowered the dart point a little bit, but the pulling above the bust bothers me a LOT more than the high dart.
I do like the two piece sleeve, although I did need to taper it in a couple of inches at the wrist—the bicep width is great, though. After comparing it with the sleeve for my Springy Coat, I added only 3cm of length, but then I lost about half of that trying to get the stripes to match up between my under and over-sleeve, and it’s still long enough. Which means that’s a very long sleeve to begin with, since it’s not unusual for me to add 3″ of length, not 3 cm. I wish I’d been able to keep the full 3cm, though—somehow with turn of cloth and everything it wound up about the same exact length as the Springy Coat sleeves, which are just a little shorter than I’d like. (Keeping in mind that I am obsessed with overly-long sleeves. Probably the length would be perfect for a normal person.)
Oh, yeah. It comes with pockets! They are obscenely tiny. Make them bigger. BIGGER.
I do enjoy my lace, even though it adds to the business of my busy fabric. I used two rows to cover the yoke parts, and just had to piece in a tiny bit right along the shoulder-line.
I think that’s it. I like the pictures. I love how it looks on the hanger. It just remains to be seen if tight is actually TOO TIGHT.
The hood looks perfect when it’s down. Just the right amount of fabric to sit nicely.
All in all, I think I will be happy once the plaid-related trauma fades…
Tanit-Isis Sews 