After all my weekend travel in October, I finally had a chance this past weekend to get back to work on my Lady Grey Coat.
Some things I accomplished since Friday:
- Cut out shell fabric
- Sewed sleeves, belt and belt loops.
- Made two practice bound buttonholes and two real ones and one self-covered button (had to use my teeth to get the back on!)
- Seamed back pieces
- Pad-stitched the under-collar and one lapel (working on the other tonight).
As one might guess from this list, I'm kinda going at this a little scattershot.
I sewed the sleeves and belt because I wanted to see instant progress, and I wanted to get all the pad stitching set up so I could do the actual hand-sewing watching TV during the week. My hope is to have all the hand stitching done by the end of Friday and get the majority of the shell sewn this weekend and the lining fabric cut out. The goal is to have a finished coat by Thanksgiving. Wish me luck!!
Here are some progress photos of my favorite details:
Top stitching on the seams. It makes the coat look particularly "coaty" to me.
Pad stitching on the lapel. It's hard to tell in the photo, but it makes a huge difference in the way the lapel lays. It's a time consuming process, but totally worth it I think. The finished lapel took me some Jeopardy!, an hour of the Ken Burn's Mark Twain documentary and two hours of Circus on PBS. (Which, have you seen Circus? It's really really well done. I'm enjoying it lot.)
Pad-stitching on the roll line of the under-collar.