My wardrobe lacked a transitional coat. I’ve got plenty of jackets, one heavy-duty winter coat, and nothing in the middle. I also wanted a nice coat. A “nice coat”, in my mind, is a tiny bit dressy but also timeless. I had hoped this pattern/project could be both – a simple clean silhouette in a classic color with a few details that caught my eye – but unfortunately, I think it looks like I’m wearing a crumpled brown paper sack.



But for good or ill it cost a fair amount, it’s the exact right weight for the tepid gloomy winter this year, and I don’t need two transitional coats, so I’m stuck with this disappointing bag for who knows how long. Its soul is beige. Blah.
The pattern is the Bamboo coat from Waffle Patterns. They offer many more exciting pattern options and have a great reputation for cool outerwear, but I was a little nervous about the directions, so I picked simple. I liked the length of this pattern, the back shoulder darts, the back vent, and the hidden button placket. After comparing the sleeve and hip measurements to the Yates coat I made in late 2019, I cut size 40 sleeves, a 42 bust dart, and a 46 everywhere else. The largest available size is a 48. Looking at these photos, I wonder how many of my issues could have been solved by cutting a 48. Certainly some!
The directions are indeed really uneven. The hidden button placket? Perfectly clear, piece of cake. I really liked this detail because I doubted my ability to sew perfectly neat buttonholes (and was not motivated enough to bind them, frankly) and because I could use cheap buttons while I figured out what I really wanted. In fact, I used buttons leftover from the very first project I posted on this blog! I also found this purrfect coordinating cotton for the hidden placket innards (color matching is my favorite sport).


The welt pockets did me in, though! I sewed both at once and my final results were so warped and tortured-looking that after trying all evening to steam and press the coat fronts flat, I ultimately unpicked the welts, interfaced the backs of the openings, and patched over the snip lines with more of that cotton. I had to cut patch pockets from my scraps and hike up their placement to conceal the cotton patches after that. It’s better, but not best.

I also struggled with aspects of the lining. What, praytell, is the lower of the inset boxes meant to illustrate? Because it’s certainly not the arrangement of lining/shell that the black arrow indicates.

I fudged some sort of pleat there, as shown. At least pleating-to-fit covers a lot of sins.

But my biggest issue was the collar. It wasn’t so much how they described the collar application as the application itself, which resulted in BY FAR the thickest and most strained arrangement of seam allowances possible right where the collar and the lapel were supposed to meet in a neat corner. It was deadly! Actually unwearable, in my opinion. I attempted to fix it by unpicking the top collar from the facing and the bottom collar from the outer, re-sewing the collar as a single piece, and then sandwiching the collar piece between the neckline edges and sewing them down by hand. No pictures of the before, but this lumpy zone constitutes a vast improvement.

You might think at this point I knew the coat was going to be a flop, but I didn’t! I was still kind of excited about it! The drafting was consistently good, with lots of notches that matched well, some interesting new-to-me techniques (like snipping thick darts open), and plenty of pattern markings. So I had faith in the pattern, which, alas, I allowed to replace my own judgment.
This coat is ‘tailored’ with fusible interfacing, same as the Yates coat I sewed several years ago, but by comparison this one calls for way too much interfacing. Also, take a peek at the Yates interfacing guide, in particular the diagonal slash through the upper front/lapel interfacing. That’s the roll line! In this coat, the interfacing made no accommodation for a roll line, and I didn’t think to add one! No wonder it’s bulky and graceless. I’m just kicking myself. By the time I noticed I would have had to undo a huge amount of stitching, including my weird collar surgery, and I wasn’t sure I could finagle that again.
But none of this would really matter if I loved the finished coat, which I don’t. It doesn’t love me either. It’s just so blah. By the time of the final try-on I was so over it that I didn’t even blind-stitch the cuffs in place – I just tacked them down in one or two places each and called it a day.

This sadsack of a coat would probably drape better if I had used a traditional slippery lining fabric, but the lining is the one thing I’m willing to go to bat for.

It’s Lady McElroy cotton lawn and it’s smooth and crisp and beautiful and it’s squandered here, though just as I hoped and expected, the camel linework on the dogs plays so nice with the outer fabric, and if this was indeed a nice coat I would be so excited about that. Oh, and I added a hanging loop.

Cool.
The fabric for this project came from Minerva, except for the interfacing and coordinating cotton, from my stash and Gather Here respectively. I mentioned a couple posts ago that I probably wouldn’t order from Minerva again. This is the perspective of an American, so take that into account! As I see it, the Minerva pros include: a large selection, a decent search filter, and pretty good user buy-in, so that you can often see a fabric and a finished garment immediately below. I also love that you can order fractional yardage (or I guess more accurately, meterage!). My personal cons: a long shipping time (for obvious reasons), higher prices (I spend dollars, and the fabric is priced in pounds), and – and this could easily have happened in shipping, not packaging, and not be Minerva’s fault at all – a strong bad odor when I unwrapped the fabric. My wool and cotton lawn both smelled powerfully of cigarette smoke. I washed the cotton lawn in the washer and aired out the wool, and luckily both are now odorless, but I’m still feeling gun-shy. Especially because of the wool! That could have gone really, stinkily wrong!



Of course, I’m not going to have to get wool from anywhere for ages, because this coat is going to last for a really long time. BLAAAH!
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Pattern: Waffle Patterns Bamboo coat
Pattern cost: $13.59
Size: sleeves 40; bust dart 42; otherwise 46
Supplies: 2.5 meters of Minerva Core Range Melton Wool Blend Coating Fabric in Camel; 1.7 meters of Lady McElroy Marlie Cotton Lawn Fabric in Navy, Minerva; 1/2 yard of Kona Cotton in Biscuit, Gather Here, $103.99; thread, Michael’s, $2.09; buttons, interfacing from stash
Total time: 19.75 hours
Total cost: $119.67