WIP report: me and gerry

it started, like so many innocent things, with a casual conversation.

ginger:  “hey, i am thinking of making a coat.”
me:  “yay, that is awesome!”
ginger: ….
ginger:  “don’t you think you want to make a coat too?”
me: ….
me:  “OF COURSE I DO!  let us be best friends forever and i will terrify you with my intricate and insane plots for tailoring and interlining and doug the pug will hide in the piles of your shredded fabrics that i have persuaded you to buy, mwah ha ha.”

ok, it didn’t really go like that.

but i find it helpful to blame ginger for my current, WIP-ified predicament. as you know by now, we settled on the gerard coat by republique du chiffon, which really has a great, on-trend silhouette and that je-n’est-sais-quoi that so many of the cute europrean patterns have. ginger soon zoomed in on the gorgeous pink boucle (with, i confess, some gentle persuasion on my part) and i immediately went for a dyed mohair number from elliott berman textiles that you may have spotted already expertly deployed by rolling in cloth.

and here i got ambitious, but in a different way than ginger.

• i decided to interline the coat.  i am a small person and i get cold.  easily.  the giant mohair blanket was not going to be enough for me, so i cut another layer of lambswool interlining (from steinlauf and stoller).
• i decided to do some light tailoring on the coat with horsehair canvas from the stash.
• doing both of these things meant cutting an extra four pieces of each pattern piece, and that was before i cut the lining.

and o!  the lining!  i was desperate to cut everything out all in one day and used some stash, off-white flannel-backed satin.  but really the off-white was way too plain and since it was polyester i could not tie-dye it into oblivion.  so i scored two competing options from B&J fabrics and after much instagram persuasion settled on the gray.

then me and gerry had a little spat.  nothing major, but i had so many cut-out pieces and bits and bobs that i was completely not in the mood to associate myself with him and i needed some alone time.  dude, i can’t be tied down.  i’m a free spirit.  or at least that would have been the conversation if, you know, garments could talk.

ginger:  “how are you doing with your coat?”
me: …
ginger:  “i am DONE.  DONE.  mwah ha ha.”

and now, back on track, i have this.  more to come when i get that lining in there and that hem tacked down.