COATS : Adjusting my favourite pattern

This was actually a lot easier than I expected it to be!  And I'd say thats down to two things:

1. I'm pretty familiar with the pattern; and
2. I had the one I made last year on my headless helper and I could pin things to it to check fit.

I thought I would tackle the shawl collar adjustment first.  For a refresher, this is what I wanted my coat pattern to look like:

The collar on the pattern is not dissimilar, its just much smaller, what I needed to do was enlarge it.  So I got out my tape measure and measured what to add.

I then adjusted the pattern piece.  On this pattern the bit of the collar that you see is actually the inside facing.

Once I'd done that I cut it out from that vintage bedsheet I've been using recently, and pinned it on to check how I went.  This is the front:

And this is the back

You can see how the pen line on the sheet piece is pulling away from the centre line of the coat... so I added a wedge shaped piece to stop this from happening.  I made a new collar piece

And adjusted the front piece

I got the shapes for these new pattern pieces from cutting the facing piece into two where the seam line for the original collar is on the coat.  You can see why having the three dimensional coat was so handy at this point!

And that was that one done!  On to the cape collar!

When I looked at the original coat, with the collar flipped up, it would do up to the neck, so there was no redrafting needed of the front pieces, just the facing, a new collar, and new cape pieces.

The facing ended up like this so that I have something to attach the lining to at the back of the neck (I didn't want to attach the lining to the collar).

Then I played around with a piece of the sheet to make a collar that I liked the look of.

Then I played around with shapes for the cape, and this is what I came up with:

And with it all pinned together I put the coat on to make sure I could still move my arms... and I could!  I turned these two pieces of fabric into pattern pieces and I was in business.

This was actually a really fun thing to do on a Sunday afternoon with a cup of tea.  However, I think all the cutting out won't be quite as enjoyable!  I will need to find 'the zone'.  Wish me luck!!

Beccie
xxx