Boyfriend Grey Top Coat

Its that time of the year – coat/jacket time! I’ve bee drooling after those oversized boyfriend coats and pinning them like crazy. I used to be crazy about hoodie coats, but this year I got into coats with lapels. So I made this coat.

I made it from a modified version of burda 2/2010, coat 126. I had used this pattern before but it didnt fit great. So this time I actually spend time and made a muslin & adjusted pattern to fit. I followed a bunch of tutorials on how to adjust the shoulder to be narrower. I cant believe I never properly adjusted all my patterns before!! I’ve always only adjusted for narrower shoulders while I was sewing. The shoulder/arm hole part came out exactly the way I liked! I didnt want the thing to be too oversized and overwhelm my petite frame – so no dropped sleeves or super roomy bodice this time.

I also added a nice welt pocket using this tutorial – I’ve done welt pockets many times on quite a few coats, but every time I need to do them again, I had to find a tutorial as I always forget how its done.  I like how this pocket turned out.

This is also the second time I did notched collar. I didnt do a great job the first time, so this time I followed some tutorial and paid more attention to under collar and over collar when sewing. It turned out quite well – except for a little bunching around the corners – bad sewing by me. But its much better than my first attempt and I love how it turned out.

Of course, like all my coats I have embroidered my signature tag:

I finished muslin and started laying out the pattern pieces right before delivery, and finished the coat 4 weeks after delivery with cutting/sewing for 5-15 minutes here and there. There wasnt that many pieces involved, so it was a pretty fast project for a coat. The outer shell is a wool/poly blend with gold threads from Hancock, and the inside is a very slippery 100% rayon from fashionfabricclub.

One thing about the fitting though – I did muslin the week before the delivery, so obviously I wasnt sure if the waist fits well or not even during sewing. So it doesnt exactly button up right now. even though the waist part is loose and not fitted, the hip part is very small and i cant close it up. My hips are still a few inches bigger than before delivery, so perhaps at some point in the future i will be able to button it up. Fortunately I only intent to wear this open, so its okay if I can never button it up. But for the future I may have to make the front or back piece roomier.

(oops, forgot to suck in those postpartum tummy in above photo. I still got months before I have to worry about those baby weight, right? right?!?)

Anyways, I love this coat! I cant wait to wear it out – not quite mommy wear so I may have to wait until I go back to work. I might want to make another jacket/coat this year. I realized that on all the coats I want – the notch part of the collar sits a lot lower than this. So I might have to make another oversized look with that detail!