I love this coat! It's 100% awesome wool with a 100% silk lining. Oh yeah, you heard me, this coat is legit. Not even Anthro provides coats this nice at their $300 premium. The only problems I had with this coat straight off the rack were the short sleeves and the trench-like length. The sleeves were just about a half inch too short & the length about 8 inches too long. It took me a long while to figure out how I would adjust this coat & thought I would share with you my thought process & how I came up with the final refashion.
- Originally I thought I would lengthen the sleeves by adding the equivalent to a sleeve dickie, but as the sleeves had button enclosures, I didn't really see how that would work in my favor.
- Then Liz gave me the brilliant idea to add fur cuffs to the coat. I found some inspiration & I even bought some killer zebra fur, but it quickly became a giant hot mess as I got to sewing. Real fur is a giant mess to work with. Yuck.
- After seeing a giant hot mess of my awesome coat I really wanted to give up, but I still had 6 inches of wool that I cut off the bottom left to use as scrap. I used every last bit of those scraps to make new cuffs and sewed some linear details on the cuffs to match the collar.
So, once I finally figured out the vision, the coat didn't take a whole lot to revamp. Here's the list of final alterations:
- shortened hem by 8 inches
- hemmed the silk lining, didn't need to hem the wool part, though (YAY!)
- removed old cuff & used as a pattern template for longer sleeves
- bought brass buttons for a double button closure on the sleeves
Overall this alteration took 9-10 hours to complete. I'm sure it would've been faster if my studio were remotely organized & I didn't watch so much tv while doing the refashion. So, what do you think? Good fix? I do. I'm really excited to sport my fancy coat at Alt next week!