The Monochrome Dreamcoat : Part 2

While I love reading other peoples year end reviews and plans for next year - and in the past have done them myself - I'm not going to do one of my own. I don't really know what to say about this year, it's had it's ups and downs certainly. I've gone from wanting to sew and blog all the time to completely losing both my sewing and blogging mojo's and in truth can't wait to see the back of 2016!

What I am going to do is share with you the project I'm most proud of this year; possibly the project I'm most proud of ever.

Vivienne Westwood style coat

Back at the end of October I wrote this post about the inspiration behind this project and my trials with my toile. Once that was done I promptly lost all confidence in the project and couldn't get my head around tackling anything so big and it sat on my mannequin making me feel guilty every time I passed it.

It was a project I desperately wanted to complete, but mentally things took a bit of a dip and I just couldn't face making a start. I was overwhelmed by other commitments, work was getting busier and my anxiety put in a reappearance.

It was only when I was contemplating possible projects to tackle on a 3-day workshop with Alison Smith at the beginning of December that I decided the coat would be the thing to take. If that was all I had with me to work on, then I'd have to do it, wouldn't I?

I'm so glad I did take the coat as my project - I literally spent the entire first day and part of the second morning cutting out - if I'd been doing that at home on my own I'd have got bored and put everything to one side again. Or more likely, left it all over the dining room and just walked away!

Almost finished cutting out!

I had a couple of minor panics on the first day, not least because when I went to cut out the collar I realised I'd brought the wrong pattern piece with me. I'd drafted several collars while making my toile and obviously picked up the wrong one. (I actually found the right one this morning when I was looking for something else!). After panicking for several minutes I calmly unpicked the collar from my toile and used that to make a new pattern piece.

Trial bound buttonhole in faux leather

The coat actually came together very smoothly - with a little help from Alison - with only a few minor headscratching moments due to it being asymmetric. I was constantly terrified that I was cutting things back to front, which probably made the cutting out take longer than necessary.

I love how the back of the collar rolls

But I cracked on and at the end of three long, tiring days I came away with an almost complete coat. All that was left for me to do at home was hem it and sew the buttons on. Hemming actually took much longer than I thought, that hem is pretty long!