I heard someone say recently that the upcoming Melbourne winter would be the coldest on record. This piece of news made my spine freeze up. I’m not much good these days with extremes in temperature. I dread those (albeit stunning) summer days of 30°C heat, and equally, the chill cold of winter totally does me in.
I spent the next few days pondering and worrying, and in a moment of pure inspiration, I decided I’d make a coat. A beautiful, warm and cozy coat to get me through the upcoming wintery ordeal. Why was that so inspirational? Well, the last time I’d made a coat – in fact, the only time I’ve ever made a coat, was 40 years ago when I made my beautiful wool flannel plaid trench coat. Yes, that’s me in the picture below. I’m holding my first child, Devorah, resting her on my six-months’ pregnant belly.
I’ve thought of making a coat many times since then, but for one reason or another, I never got to it. So, I decided – this will be The Year I Finally Sew Myself A New Coat.
I spent a few hours browsing through my Evernote sewing pattern library, as well as looking on sewing pattern websites to see what was around, and narrowed my selection down to three patterns – Vogue Patterns V8933, Butterick Patterns B6244, and BurdaStyle’s Vintage Kim Coat.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?), I’m complete rubbish at choosing only one of anything. After much deliberation, I’d finally managed to narrow my shortlist down to three, and there I got stuck! But no problem! Three is better than one, right? I decided I’d make ALL of them, starting with the beautiful Burda coat. I adore the way the pockets are created in this pattern, and those sleeves and collar look amazing too. I pulled a gorgeous deep plum boiled wool from my fabric stash.
I bought the pattern, downloaded the files, and opened the pattern file to find that there was no print shop copy, only an A4 copy with 40 pages!
Luckily, my friend Lena from Iconic Patterns piped up on my Instagram post offering to convert all those pesky pages into one continuous large-formatted file, and print it out for me too! Amazing! Lena’s on Fiverr as elebereth, and charges AU$10 to perform her magic.
She saved me hours of pasting and tape, and I had the printed pattern ready for pickup on the same day. Perfect! Thanks so much Lena, you’re a gem!
