Spring motivation and UFOs

And I'm not talking little grey men with big heads, big eyes and small mouths a la X-Files... rather Un-Finished-Objects!

There is something about Spring that makes me want to clean things up and finish things that I've previously had no motivation to finish... like this house coat.

Isn't it a lovely pattern!

I bought this pattern a while ago, and managed to find some floral corduroy to make it from and some lovely soft minkie fabric to line it with, and got ready to start... and thats where things started to go wrong. 

The corduroy was not as good quality as I would have liked, and it was REALLY narrow, so that mean that the coat isn't as long as I wanted.  And then I didn't have quite enough minkie - I was able to cut out everything but the sleeves.  And hot pink being such a popular colour, I have never been able to get any more of it.

So its been all cut out (well as much as I could anyway) and laying on the floor of my sewing room in the corner where I could ignore it for MONTHS.  Until last weekend.

Full of motivation from getting so much pre-washing and tidying done, I decided it was about time I got over my issues and got on with my house coat!

And of course I did bound button holes!  Now that I know how to do them, I'm addicted to their 'look'.

I decided to go with a contrasting pink for the button holes

And as is typical with me, I'm following the pattern, but I'm not following the pattern, all at the same time.  I'm lining the housecoat with the minkie fabric, but not in the same way that you would normally line something, since the minkie is heavier than the corduroy (I'm not buying from ebay again!).  Instead, I'm pretending that the right side of the minkie is the wrong side of the corduroy.  Except for where the front facing is, there it looks like the traditional lining.

Doesn't the pink go well with the corduroy!?!

But the remainder of the seams are sewn so that when you iron them flat, the corduroy shows over the minkie... like this:

Eventually this back seam will look like the top couple of inches on the vertical seam.  I've trimmed the minkie close to the stitching line (it doesn't fray) then I'm folding the seam allowance in half, with the cut bit going under.  Then I'll probably have to hand sew it down.  For the other seams, like the horizontal one shown here, I will make some bias tape out of the scraps or corduroy, and hand sew it around the seams.  I think it looks pretty with the corduroy showing over the minkie!

So anyway, I got a pretty long way through it last weekend considering I was also running around the country side and prewashing fabric!  It looks like this:

I've bought some heart shaped pink buttons for it!

I think when the bow embellishments are on it will look really nice!

I might do the bow in the pink cotton I did the button holes in yet...

And after all the worrying about it being too short, it comes down to my knees!  So this weekend I will attempt to put in the sleeves and the pockets and do all the other little tasks like seam finishing, hemming, stitching on buttons etc.  Fingers crossed I'll have a finished garment to show you next week!

And let me tell you, it feels good to get this thing off my floor!

Beccie
xxx