I have decided to add a new photo album of older garments that I made pre-blog. In truth I don’t have a lot of them. The garments from my 20’s are long gone and I haven’t done as much sewing in recent years, although I am trying to sew more. Still I want to save pictures of a few things while I still have the opportunity.
This coat was made in February 2004 while I was in San Francisco at one of Sandra Betzina’s sewing weeks. At the time, I wondered if I was being silly sewing a coat in February when I could have been working on spring things. As luck would have it a major snowstorm blanketed the east coast a few days before I was supposed to fly home and I was lucky to have the finished coat. I wore it home and then I wore it for the next 3 months. We had snow and freezing temperatures on Memorial Day weekend that year which is very unusual. In fact it was still cold as late as July 4th that year, in the 40s, after which we it became brutally hot.
Boy was I glad I made a new coat.
But the coat doesn’t work anymore and so I am going to donate it. I wore it for that first extended winter and all the next winter. Last winter (2005/2006 I gained too much post-menopausal weight and it was too tight across the upper chest and upper arms.
This year it is no longer tight, but it doesn’t fit. Perhaps it never did, perhaps I have just shifted enough that the problems are more noticeable.
First of all it is considerably too big across the front chest. That could be taken in.
But it is feels too tight through the upper back and I have trouble moving my arms. I have checked this, it is no narrower than coats that fit comfortably so it must be something else.
When you look at the photo you notice the wrinking and pulling at the right shoulder. That is because my right shoulder rolls forward. When we made the coat, we moved the shoulder seams forward, but I did not yet know how to redraft a shoulder shape and corresponding armscye to accommodate that kind of shoulder shape. I don’t have enough room to move my arms because the ease is in the wrong place. This is not so easily fixed without redrafting the coat and I have no extra fabric.
The problem is not noticeable in a coat that is a little broad through the shoulders and I have the height to pull that off but in a more fitted coat, like this Fashion Sewing Group pattern, it is a definite problem.
This was also the first coat I had made in several years, and I used some
new techniques and abandoned some old ones, I am not sure all that
successfully. I am happy I made it, it has garnered many compliments,
but there are definitely things I learned and things I would do
differently if I were making it again today.
(The only reason the left shoulder looks good is I stuffed an extra shoulder pad and some batting in there because it is now so loose over my chest the coat just collapses. Then I had to push and prod and pull to get the coat to even begin to hang naturally. Believe me it did not originally look like this. And Matilda needs liposuction again, but has decided to wait until after the holidays, so the coat pulls on her in places it does not pull on me.)
Here is a detail of the front hooks:
