I can’t believe it’s time to start back at #1. The cold weather has finally come to Birmingham, so I couldn’t resist making my Butterick coat first. My inspiration for this coat is Kelly Reilly’s coat in the 2014 movie Calvary. You pretty much see her character wearing it throughout the whole movie, therefore I found myself daydreaming about owning it throughout the whole movie.

You’re daydreaming about owning this coat now too, aren’t you?

This is the coat that made me switch from using the Andy pattern by Named, to searching and thankfully finding the Butterick 5654 pattern from 1991. I pondered making my coat look exactly like the one from the movie, but I already have a nice hunter green one and I didn’t want to go overboard with green coats, ya know? So, I decided to go with grey (or gray – but I like using the e).

The pattern wasn’t very hard, or maybe I’m getting better – yeah let’s go with that. Anything I messed up on was mainly just me moving too fast and not paying attention to the instructions. My biggest mess up was with the interfacing. The instructions have you sew it on and then apply it to the fabric. Well I accidently sewed and ironed one piece onto the wrong side. I didn’t notice until hours later. I had to carefully pull it off the fabric, and let me tell you I was quite tense pulling interfacing off wool tweed. I also had some issues with the collar. I didn’t sew properly between the markings. I was able to play with it a bit and make it work. I don’t think it’s really noticable with how the collar lays.

I’m really in love with this coat. There’s definitely a 90s feel going on. Does it look like it swallows me? Maybe, but I’m happy about it. I chose to make version C, which was supposed to be shorter than some of the other options, but it’s still pretty long on me. Most of my coats end at my waist and one ends at my mid-thigh, so this is a really fun addition to my coat collection. And it has pockets! Pockets = happy hands. I think total this coat took me 16 hours. I had random spurts of time this past week where I’d try to get a few hours in here and there. I can’t be nicknamed Speedy quite yet. I will say I’m really proud of myself for sticking with this pattern and not trying to take any shortcuts. This was definitley a good start to my 2016 sewing and to the winter.

Stay cozy out there!

♥ Pamela