A coat is only as good as its lining.
Crazy, I know, but lining a winter coat (especially a twirly one!) can make all the difference when its cold outside and you’re working with heavy fabrics that might lend themselves to fraying. A little boucle, a little tweed, lots of wool- all of it can fray like crazy and a lining that can make the inside as beautiful as the outside can make a world of difference.
Of course, depending on the type of coat that you make and your local climate, the lining can vary in composition. Charmeuse, silk, cotton- so many different fabrics exist with properties that will support your lifestyle.
For my Butterick B5824, I went with a polyester- wait whaaaat? But yes! Living in San Francisco can be chilly, but not terribly cold, so with a cotton underlining in my coat, I knew a simple polyester fabric would suffice, as long as it was silky enough to not cling to me as I walked.
This Twirly Coat was in Collaboration with the beautiful Christina from Gussets and Godets! Her coat is gorgeous.
The red jacket is such a stunning piece and it suits her 100%! Definitely head on over to her post about this to see more photos from her photoshoot, because not gunna lie, she’s rocking it!
The red makes this VAVAVOOM- and of course the leopard print faux fur lapel gives it that little extra Vintage Girl twist. In regards to sewing linings, she bagged her lining, which is a different technique than I cover in my YouTube video. Bagging a lining can be a bit of a mind game, but she makes it look easy and it helps things stitch up so much faster, too!
Christina and I went back and forth over what jacket to make for the past couple months for this collab and I’m so glad we went with this one! Granted, lots of hold ups (on my end!) in terms of when we would post our jackets, but in the end, it all came together. During the jacket research part of this project, we also were super shocked at the lack of jacket patterns out there that were super vintage inspired. In the end, we just had to go with Gertie’s design.
This is my third collaboration for the blog so far and it’s always super fascinating to see how our garments could be from the same pattern, but turn out so differently!
I took a deep dive into sewing vintage linings for the first time with Butterick B5821.
It wasn’t as tricky as anticipated, and I’m so happy that I was able to create a video to show others how to do it as well!
Using my own vintage coats, as well as a 1940s reference book, I taught myself one of the many old school ways of getting this done and I’ll be using that technique moving forward as I work on my 2017 goal of making more coats.
I’m so proud to continue to learn new skills, like how to sew more authentically vintage.
This is such a huge component to my sewing and to my experience as a seamstress. There are thousands of ways to get a technique done- so even after 15 years of sewing, I am still near the tip of the iceberg of everything I can learn and improve upon.
Recently I got a YouTube comment about how and why I spend so much time doing the tedious things, versus finding the happiness in just sewing and to be honest, it’s the tedious things that bring me joy in what I sew. All of them build up on each other and simply cranking out a project for the sake of cranking it out isn’t very me. I savor the process of doing it by hand and being authentic in my approach.