Warm Coat

I'm headed to Baltimore in January to show off one of my sewing projects.  You'll get to see that and the process of making it soon.  I know just how nasty Maryland can get in the winter and I need a warmer coat.  I have this lovely purple boiled wool sitting in my closet, earmarked for a warm winter coat.  I thought I even had a a pattern picked out, McCall 6800, the one I used to make this coat.  There's just one snag -- the sleeves.  After careful measurements, it turns out the sleeves aren't big enough.  That's not a problem with the green coat, where the fabric is a stretchy fleece, but with the wool it would be. This green coat looks warm, but it has the problem that neither the outer fabric nor the lining is particularly windproof.  It's great on a still night, but get a breeze and a windchill and it's not so warm.

It's certainly possible to modify a lot in a pattern, but my experience is that making two piece sleeves wider is pretty tricky and I certainly don't want to ruin the the wool.  It was time to start over and get a new plan.

I found this pattern, Vogue 9289.  (Fortunately, Vogue patterns were on sale that day.)  It's got two piece sleeves that are cut quite a bit wider. 

This sort of pattern isn't very efficient on the fabric, so there wasn't enough of the wool to make this work.  My local fabric store had literally no heavy, windproof fabric that I liked.   But, fleece was on sale.  I reasoned that maybe if the lining was windproof, the result would be reasonably warm.  (Yes, I know you loose some of the insulating properties of the fleece by doing it this way.)  

I picked an astronomical print for the coat.  It's got lots of planets and spiral galaxies -- perfect for someone like me!

For the lining, I chose ripstop nylon, a thin but very windproof fabric for the lining.  It's used for back packing tents and sometimes windbreakers, but I've never seen it used as a lining before.


Just cutting out the coat was a challenge.  Because the side front and side and back pieces are so wide, the fabric could not be folded and cut.  It had to be laid out on the floor and each piece individually cut.  I had just enough room in my living room to make this work.

Come back next week and see how it turned out!

Fun with Fleece Part 6

With temperatures warming a bit, it's time to think of transitional clothes for those cooler than average (or warmer than average, for northerners) days.

This final installment in the Fun with Fleece series features a sporty jacket that's a long way from fleece's origins as an active wear fabric.  It has facings, a real collar, and button closures.  It's made from the out of print, but still available Simplicity 4032.   This pattern was specifically made for fleece and takes advantage of it's no fray property on the collar and front band.   Yes, that collar is a double layer of fleece, not sewn together at the outer edge for a unique look.

I embellished the sleeves with designs from Embroidery Library with a tropical feel.  One has hummingbirds, the other parrots. 

The designs aren't identical, but they have the same theme and feel.  I also used common thread colors where possible and chose the thread for both designs at the same time.  The result is a delightful jacket suitable for a lot of occasions and the unpredictable spring weather.

Come back next week for more Fun with a Sewing Machine!

Fun with Fleece Part 5

It's March, so it's still cold in northern parts of the county, but the flowers are coming out in the South and Southwest.

 For those of you up north, it's time for a fun, flowery scarf to anticipate the coming season.   This simple fleece scarf is enhanced with fleece flowers.

There's lots of hand work making and attaching the flowers, but the hard work of doing all the cutting could be made a lot easier by using a cutter like the Cricut Maker.

Doesn't the fleece flower remind you just a bit of this camellia?

Came back next week for more fun with fleece!

Fun With Fleece Part 4

It's getting to be a good time for lightweight spring jackets -- a perfect application for fleece, especially since they don't absorb water from those spring showers. 

Here's a jacket in the currently popular hip length style.  It's made from Butterick 6329, which wasn't designed for fleece, but works well with the material.  For the fabric, I chose a hand-dyed look rather than a solid in a very spring-like bright green.

Of course, I couldn't very well just leave it alone.  I chose some designs featuring plumeria flowers and butterflies from Embroidery Library (They label the flower frangipani, another name for the same thing, popular in different regions.) It isn't a spring flower, particularly, since it only grows in tropical regions, but how many people know that?

The original designs had the flowers in white and yellow, but I know that they come in pink as well, so I changed the colors to contrast better with the green.  

The designs on both the center back and on the sleeves are on top of a seam.  Just the seams under the embroidery had to be sewn before the embroidery, with all the other seems sewn after.  This isn't exactly the order described in the instructions for the pattern, but it worked well enough.  Embroidering over seams can be tricky on some fabrics, but it works really well with fleece.  Just just a solid sew-in stabilizer to make sure the design doesn't come apart at the seam later.

I wanted a small design for the front to echo the others.  I extracted this single flower using my Florini Total Control software.  Having the flower the same scale at the others works well, rather than having a whole design made small.

Here's the back of the jacket.  It's fun having something bright and spring like to wear on these days that can still be a bit chilly.

Come back next week for more fun with a sewing machine!

Fun With Fleece Part 3

Fleece has been largely confined to active wear and casual attire.  I decided to experiment and see if it would work in a more formal setting.

I made this jacket with Kwik Sew 664 (out of print).  The pattern suggests fleece as one of the possible fabrics to use.  I chose black to make it more formal and to use metallic thread embroidery to enhance the idea that it's a formal garment.

The jacket has raglan sleeves.  The challenge was to create a design that was the right shape for each half of the sleeves, so that the sleeves could be embroidered before the sleeve seams were sown.

I started with an Embroidery Library design.  The design was not the right shape, but I figured that I could use an editor to move the stars around to get the right shape.  I ended up going to a friend's house and working with Floriani Total Control for the first time.  I did get the stars moved into a suitable shape and started thinking about buying digitizing software for myself.

Does the jacket work as formal wear?  There are limits. I would wear it for a nice night on the town, like to the Huntsville Symphony, but not to a really formal, wear a long dress, kind of event.  In the climate of Northern Alabama, fleece makes sense most of the winter and wool isn't really necessary.  This sort of jacket works well.  In a colder, wetter climate, I'd choose wool.

Raincoat Fix

I made a raincoat and blogged abut it here and here.   There's only one problem: the hood isn't quite long enough and the top of my head gets wet.  I decided the solution was to add a visor to the hood.  This will lengthen it and even keep the water out of my eyes.

The project started with a drawing of what I wanted the shape of the hood to be.  Because the visor will be symmetrical, it's only half of what I need.

I cut two of the visor shapes from the scraps of the raincoat fabric and two from sew-in interfacing.

All four pieces are sewn together to form a two-sided visor.  I tried using the seam tape on this again, but it didn't work well.

Finally, I opened the seam between the hood and the lining, inserted the visor, and sewed everything back together.  The seam isn't completely waterproof, but hopefully, that won't be too much of a problem.

Come back next week for more fun with a sewing machine!

Fun with Fleece Part 2

It's definitely winter now, even here in the Tennessee Valley.  It's a great time for a fun, warm, and cozy coat.

I liked McCalls's 6800.   This pattern calls for wool coating material or something similar.  Fabric like that is not only quite expensive, it's a bit excessive for the fairly mild winters of northern Alabama.  I elected instead to use fleece.  Since fleece has mild tendency to stretch, I used a completely non-stretchy lining fabric, polyester satin, to help the coat maintain it's shape.

The particular version of the coat I made has an asymmetric hemline, a lot longer in the back than in the front.  That let's the lining show when you wear the coat, so I choose a purple lining, just for a fun flash of color as I walk.  I also found that the shape of the hem made getting in and out of cars while wearing the coat a whole lot easier.

 Winter can be a rather dreary season, so why not brighten up winter clothing with some cheerful embroidery?  I chose some Hungarian style florals from Embroidery Library.    The purple from the lining even appears in the design, although it's not prominent.

The skirt of the coat is quite full and the hem quite long, giving me space for lots or repetitions of the design.  Usually, I try to embroider pieces before sewing them together, but that wasn't possible for this design.  The entire body of the coat has to be assembled before the embroidery along the hem was done so that the designs could be evenly spaced.  Many of them are embroidered over a seam.

Smaller elements from the design along the hem brighten the lapel and the bottoms of the sleeves.

Come back next week for a Christmas themed project!

Fun With Fleece Part 1

Polyester fleece is a fairy new and readily available material.  It's got a lot of nice properties.  It absolutely won't ravel, it's warm, light, wears well, has a little stretch, and embroiders well.  The usual use for fleece has been blankets and active wear style jackets.  I decided to explore different possible uses for fleece and came up with a few.  This series will explore some of the more successful experiments.

One great pattern for fleece is McCall's 5252.   This pattern has been around a while, possibly because it's such a wardrobe staple.  The pattern was originally designed for fleece and comes in variants with a hood or as a vest.

For the purple edition of the jacket, I embellished it with Art Deco Swan designs from Embroidery Library.

The swans on the front were difficult to do: the straight lines of the frames were very hard to keep straight so near the edge of the fabric.  The feather designs on the sleeves have a tendency to curl; the designs are a bit too dense for the fabric.  Still, it's a striking and useful jacket.

A different version of the jacket was originally intended as a cycling jacket.  That's the reason for choosing the very bright chartreuse color.  This version has elastic in the bottom and ends of sleeves to keep the wind out. 

I decorated this jacket with metallic embroidery, including one design on the upper back.  The metallic thread has held up well over several years.   However, fleece isn't particularly wind proof, so this jacket has some major downsides for cycling.

The third edition of this jacket was the most successful.  The light blue color is for the sky, and it's decorated with hummingbirds.

Each of the 8 hummingbirds is unique and I chose them all to residents or visitors to southern Arizona.  The hummingbird designs are dense, but they are also so small that they don't cause problems with the fabric.  This jacket is very popular among my bird loving friends.