#shitty sewing

1. What I started with

Here’s the before picture of the coat without any modifications. It was a bit big on me (I’m quite petite) and rather boxy. It was also giving really intense grandma vibes and not in a good way

2. Questionable Tailoring

The first thing I did was pull an inch or two of fabric in from each side of the coat toward the center seam in back. This was simply done so the coat would fit my small shoulders better and the collar would sit higher on my neck.

Why am I doing it this way, you ask? Easy. I am too lazy to rip open the seams and tailor it properly. I just learned how to sew recently exclusively by trial and error so everything I do here is a series of atrocious shortcuts that would make any seasoned sewist cringe. Take my actions with a very large grain of salt.

3. Actually I lied I did rip some seams

I increased the height of the slit/vent in the back to sit around the tailbone, and I added some pleats to mimic the additional fabric that late 18th century & early 19th century coats tended to have around the back vent. I chose not to sew these pleats down, I just pressed them later.

4. Changing the shape

Then, to get the curved shape, I removed the buttons and pinned the fabric inwards until it looked right. I ran a small stitch along the edge to secure it in place.

(Warning: because of the curve of the fabric, the coat now rumples a bit around the hem… maybe think about this and take this into account if you plan to follow this as a tutorial)

5. Cutting & Hemming

I cut away the excess fabric (this helped reduce some of the rumple— plus, I needed the extra fabric for buttons later) and pressed the seams to flatten them. I also stitched up and pressed the sleeves to have cuffs, and secured the seam down the middle of the collar to flatten it.

6. Button time

Here is where things go from “shitty sewing” to “5 minute crafts DIY.” If you are a normal person (and you want actual functional buttons), ignore this section and just buy a kit to make fabric covered buttons and sew them on.

However, this is not what I did. Patience is a virtue I do not possess, and thus, I could not stand waiting for a button kit to arrive from Amazon. So I decided to take matters into my own hands and make my own fabric covered buttons from the materials I already had. To make matters worse, I also do not own any buttons. After much pondering, I decided to create the button bases from blobs of hot glue.

I made them in two sizes: roughly 3cm and 2.5 cm in diameter (larger: just over 1 inch wide, smaller: size of a US quarter). I cut the excess fabric from earlier into a square with enough room to gather its edges and cinch it around the hot glue blob, which would then be sewn on. I used 9 big buttons down the front of the jacket, each 2.5 inches apart. Two smaller buttons were added to each sleeve cuff.

7. Button “holes”

Because this is a costume rather than a functional daily garment, I could not be bothered to add real button holes. (I also don’t own any button hole presser foot for my sewing machine, so I really didn’t have a choice in this matter.) To lazily fake this effect I just did two layers of zigzag stitching on top of each other. Each "button hole" was approximately 1.5 inches long, which I marked on the fabric in a water-soluble ink marker.

8. “Pockets”

These were quite simple to add-- I just cut rectangles from my remaining scraps of fabric and lining and stitched them onto the side/back of the coat. Despite my intense loathing for fake pockets, I won't make use of real pockets on set to avoid adding unnecessary bulk to the costumes. Also, you guessed it, I didn’t feel like taking the time to add real pockets. So these flaps will have to do for now.

And that's about it! I'll reblog this post with more detailed shots of the coat itself.

If you're interested in how this compares to actual historical garments, here are the coats I used as reference:

Unknown Coat, V&A Museum, Boilly's Portrait of Robespierre, the first coat pictured in this LACMA exibition