No progress :-(

OK, not totally no progress--my hair canvas and weft interfacing arrived yesterday from B. Black and Sons, but I haven't touched my muslin in a week, thanks to the insanity that is full-time work, marching band season, and freelance work heating up. Plus, I'm really unhappy with my muslin (the cheap muslin from Walmart is really much too thin to do an accurate test for a wool coat), so I've been looking around the house, the church rummage sale, and the clearance rack at JoAnn's for a more suitable test fabric. Preferably one that's free or extremely cheap. No luck so far.

I have, however, been keeping up with Gertie's tutorials and am looking forward to making the coat, even if I don't finish until December. Heck, I have yet to finish a quilt I started in 1985--finishing a coat in 4 months is lightening-fast in comparison!

Slow progress

I finally pretreated my wool today, using the dryer-and-hot-towels method. It looks good and the pretreating didn't drastically change the fabric's hand, so I'm happy. My hair canvas and weft interfacing are on their way East from B. Black and Sons in L.A., and I might actually cut my fabric out in the next week if I can finish with my muslin. My sewing machine didn't care for the lightweight fabric combined with the 5-mm basting stitch, and tried to gather the fabric. So my muslin looks kind of atrocious. And the top collar is way too big, so I need to trim that down. And redo the fronts for the gaposis problem. The sleeves are already fixed.

Here's my lining fabric and buttons (I chose the ones on the left). The shell fabric is a deep red melton from Fabric.com.

Working on my muslin ... slowly

Marching band season has started, which kind of interfered with my ability to maintain this blog. But the pattern arrived, as did the lovely currant (deep red) melton wool from Fabric.com, and I bought a floral crepe de chine at JoAnn's for the lining. Pix to come, I promise. I couldn't find the tracing wheel I had back in junior high, so I had to buy a new one at JoAnn for all of $2.29, horrors. But it sure made muslin-making easier ... for past projects, I'd been tracing the pattern onto Swedish pattern paper and then making a muslin. This cut out a step, and I can use the muslin as my final pattern.

The whole thing is basted together except for the sleeves. The sleeve cap has about 2 inches too much ease in it, and although the collar covers the top of the sleeve, I'm working with a heavy enough weight wool that I don't want bulky gathers. I'm hoping to get the sleeves adjusted and basted in tonight. Gertie has posted a schedule that will have us finishing our coats in about a month ... hope I can keep up. We're supposed to cut out our fabric this week, but I haven't even pretreated my wool. I'm thinking about trying this method rather than paying the drycleaner--but I'm going to try it on another length of wool first, lol!

Getting ready

The pattern arrived today, and what a nice presentation! It's a little booklet, with clear instructions and lots of illustrations, room for notes (yay!) and the multisized pattern tissue. Sadly, I struck out at Jomar (well, for coat fabric ... I did get some other stuff!), so I'm off to order the wool online. Holding off on lining for now; I haven't seen anything fun enough, and maybe Gertie will have some suggestions on fabric or sources. In the meantime, while I'm waiting, I might tackle those Jalie 2908 jeans ...

Grey ladies and Lady Grey

Gertie is hosting a coat sewalong, and in a moment of insanity I signed up. My sewing room is so crammed with projects and projects-to-be that it's getting tough to walk in there, and the beagle has taken to napping in the doorway for lack of enough floor space anywhere else.

But I digress. Thanks to a generous former coworker, I now have a lovely stash of wool fabric. Eventually this will be three sets of plaid or houndstooth jackets with coordinating solid dress pants, just the thing for the office on cold winter days. The length of royal blue and red English houndstooth is going to be a dressy coat, based on a 1940s pattern I saw but was too cheap to pay $55 for (so I'm going to adapt a pattern I already own). Bottom line: I need to bone up on the few tailoring techniques I know and learn some new ones. And since I found Gertie's blog while searching the Internet for "tips on how to make a coat," joining the coat sewalong just seems like karma.

The sewalong pattern is the Lady Grey wrap coat from Colette Patterns, and I'm counting on the giant peplum (flare, whatever) to hide the middle-aged spread. (The grey-haired lady sews Lady Grey, lol.) I decided to look for a red wool--son's school colors are red and black, and I already have two black coats. Well, I have a red fleece jacket, too, but it's not as chic as the Lady Grey will be ... and I might as well try to look chic at some of the early-season marching band events, before it gets so cold that I just give up and wrap myself in blankets, scarves, and hats with ear flaps.

So the pattern is ordered and now it's time to find fabric. The selection at Jo-Ann is "meh" and makes me long for the days when we had 4 or 5 great fabric stores within 10 miles of the house, and they stocked more fabric than crafty stuff. I've seen something I like online, but am going to make a road trip to Jomar Fabrics before committing. Depending on how fast Gertie paces us, this coat may not be done before marching band season ends, but there will be three more seasons after this one. Gulp.