Starting with the coat

I have been offline for so long with work and life events, and also, to be honest, replacing some of my online time with sewing time. I have a lot to say though, all my blog posts were being composed in my head while I ran around.

To begin with my red gab CJDesigns Easy Coat came back from the cleaners with the mystery stains gone. This was a big event as I had already decided to take it apart and make another half a front and had got myself in a mental space to do this, and then, what do you know, the stains were gone! It was like being given a whole weekend of sewing for free, like finding a $100 gift certificate for Fabric mart under the bed, like finding out that your machine has a hidden feature for making perfect automatic buttonholes you didn't know about.

"You are miracle workers" I screamed at the cleaners.

"No actually we are drycleaners" they said while they waited for me to leave. The trick they said was that I hadn't tried to get the stain out myself. They said once a customer has started to mess with something there are other chemicals involved and it becomes hopeless. Whatever it is they said just bring it in, wine, ink or lipstick.

I will remember that.

As you can see this is just a plain old coat, but I really like it. It is simple but not too loose, and there is none of that crude easy pattern feel to it. The only design change I made this time, after the silver raincoat version, was to cut the collar back by about 3/4". You can see that it is still a pretty large and pointy collar and the only thing I might do next time is morph another collar onto it- one with a stand to lift it a bit. I have the coat in the line drawing from my 5/2009 Ottobre magazine in mind.

I also didn't add shoulder pads because there is a nice fit in the upper chest for me in a large, and I felt I didn't need them.

A TNT coat pattern for me for sure.