Wendy Gardiner creates a colourful coat with the help of Brother

Another of the many projects I’ve made on my Brother 1800QC in recent months is this colourful coat, made from fabric I had sitting in my stash for many years. I decided I wanted a new winter coat but couldn’t find what I was looking for – a hooded A-line coat with front zip – so I raided my stash, unearthed this colourful wool coating with couched yarns, and set to!

The pattern is McCall 7848 which is an easy design to construct with princess seams in the bodice, a waist seam and A-line bottom. 


Using fabric from my stash meant I didn’t have enough for the sleeves and hood, but this wasn't a problem as I had some fur fabric left over from a fleecy blanket I made for my son. That was another fun project, made using his old Band T-shirts – I cut the motifs from the fronts, stabilised them with strips of interfacing down the edges and then joined them in a jigsaw for the front, with occasional strips of fabric between as sashing to make the different sizes fit. I backed it with a black furry fleece and it looked fantastic!
But back to the coat – the surface of the fabric had been couched with all sorts of colourful and textural yarns, making the surface uneven to stitch over. Some areas were quite flat, others very bumpy, but using a walking foot helped go over the lot with ease.

I added a fur hood, sleeves and a hem trim to bring it all together. The zip is an open-ended metal zip with robust tape. I used the zip foot to attach the zip and as the coat fabric is, of course, quite springy, I then top-stitched down the front edges of the coat, travelling from the right side so that it wouldn’t get caught in the teeth when doing it up or pulling it down. There were lots of layers, but using a longer stitch length of 3mm made it easy. Changing the stitch length was super-simple – just a touch of a button and the machine shows what length is being used in the LCD window, so there's no chance of forgetting!
 I lined the coat with a purple satin lining for a strong contrast, but that meant a slippery fabric teamed with a stable and bulky woollen. This was no problem for the machine. When sewing the slippery fabric, I still used the walking foot as it helps feed slippery layers as well as thick layers.
For the hem trim, I shortened the coat by 10cm, and then added a 22 cm strip of the fur, stitching one long edge to the right side of the coat with a 1cm seam allowance. I turned the other raw edge over so there was a 10cm fur hem, tucked the raw edge under and slip stitched it to the inside of the coat fabric by hand. 

Voila – a 10cm-deep, fur-trimmed hem, fur collar and sleeves, coming together to make a coat that has received lots of compliments wherever I go – including Paris! See you next time!