Vintage-Inspired Girl's Raincoat

My daughter needed a raincoat - this is Ireland after all! With the weather forecast promising wet and mild weather here for April, I finished it just in time.

This has been on my to-do list for a while, but needed to be sewn because I only had a metre of the green polka-dot coated cotton from Westfalenstof, barely enough for my 6 year old. As I planned to make a raincoat, keeping the number of seams to a minimum to ensure it would be waterproof was a priority.

This all led me to choose a raglan coat because I love that vintage style and thought it might use less fabric than a coat with regular sleeves.

 

Raincoat with hood (colour is washed-out in this pic

Perhaps I was looking in the wrong places, but finding a modern pattern for a child's raglan-sleeved coat proved impossible. I resorted to Pinning images of vintage raglan-sleeved coat patterns and eventually decided to draft my own. Using Cal Patch's book and my daughters measurements I had no problem with the front and back pieces, but got stuck on the sleeves. Should they be in one or two pieces, should I draft following Aldrich or Armstrong? ...... Stuck .... until I saw that Sew Magazine (April’13, issue 46) had a pattern for a child's raincoat, age 2-4, with ...... raglan sleeves! The magazine also has 2 pages, 38-39, of helpful information for sewing with waterproof fabrics. It took a bit of work, but grading up raglan sleeves, proved easier than drafting from scratch.

Of course the sleeves are not perfect, but it's a wearable raincoat, and I really couldn't wish for more than that with a first effort at drafting, and not even sewing a muslin!

The colour combinations of pink and green really appeal to me so I added cuffs in a coated cotton from Hilco via Dotsnstripes. I added a little label from Farbenmix, just for fun!

With all my emphasis on the sleeves, I nearly forgot to mention that I drafted the hood from scratch, using Aldrich. It could be a little bigger, but fits and I was so pleased that I had enough fabric left for it.

There is a general theme of nearly running out of fabric throughout this post, and so it is for the green cotton lining fabric that I bought locally - didn't have enough for the sleeves, so I used a different cotton for them.

This is a picture of the inside, which also shows the zip cover/placket at the centre front which I drafted separately. I used a zip from an old raincoat of my daughters and the Velcro was leftover from my Minoru.

Not having consulted with my daughter on the design or the fabrics, I asked her if there was anything she wanted to add - her request was for pockets (for what is now an obvious reason!). So after checking my Pins for inspiration, I went with patch pockets.

She also picked the ribbon type and colour for the hanging loop and the zipper pull - details that are so tiny hat they could be missed, but are important to her. The colour of the ribbon came up blue in the picture, but is a purple stitched ribbon from janemeans, which picks up a purple in the lining. (And most recently seen threaded through lace by Ann on The Great British Sewing Bee!)

Unlike my Minoru, I didn't tape any seams in this coat so it remains to be seen how much rain it will keep out. Of course I don't intend to let my daughter out in a downpour to test it out, much as she'd probably love that!

 

 

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Colourful Teacher Gifts

 

Last year, for teacher gifts, I made the Mother & Daughter Totes from Oliver+S which is one of their free patterns. I'm not sure why I didn't make them again this year, but this pattern on Sew4home caught my eye.

It is a Roll-up Makeup Brush Case, made with a wipe-clean lining. Most of these type of patterns have square corners, but I liked the curved corners and the Sew4home website gives a template for this.

 

It's a lovely easy pattern and what took me the most time was joining the bias binding on the outside.

This is the inside of one of the rolls with some mini brushes inside

and opened out to get the full effect.

I used a very varied mixture of fabric from Stenzo, Hilco, Moda, Farbenmix, Patty Young and laminated cottons from Amy Butler and Anna Maria Horner.

 

I've had a lot of fun making these, matching and mis-matching colours of fabrics, bias and ribbons. I have 2 more to make and that will be the end of my assembly-line sewing for a while.



 

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A Feliz, and lesson learnt!

This the second dress I made for my goddaughter for her birthday this year. The first was the purple Lisette dress. She has just turned 8 and still loves dresses, but I thought it might be the last year that I could get away with making her a very ruffled dress.

The main fabric is a Hilco cotton, the red ruffle fabrics are scraps I had left, and the lining is a very lightweight cotton.

(inside front view)

All the side panel seams are flat-felled and the hems have Farbenmix ribbon sewn over them to give some weight to the dress as it is so twirly.

(inside back view)

The seam allowance of the 4 ruffles on the back are also covered in ribbon, and I gathered these using the technique I mentioned at the end of the last post. As I still dislike gathering, this meant a little less 'pain' and a lot less thread!

I thought I was quite the expert in making up this Farbenmix pattern. After making a few other versions, (can't believe it's nearly 2 years since I sewed a Feliz!) I noticed that the straps tended to slip off the shoulder at times. As it had happened with more than one dress, I went back to look at the Feliz Sewing Guide on the Farbenmix site. Some of these are in German, but the pictures are excellent.

When the pattern pieces for the straps are sewn together, there is a larger curve on one side. Intuitively, I presumed this should be closest to the neck. Lesson learnt!!! (less intuition, more following pattern instructions!). The larger curved side of the strap goes on the shoulder side, and the straps stay on the shoulders perfectly......

...even through lots of twirling. My daughter tried this on for me on a cold afternoon - hence the boots and long-sleeved top.

At the moment I'm working on this knot dress pattern for a 'Sewing on a Budget' Blogger Challenge from Abakhan Fabrics. I'm hoping the colours will work together!

 

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More Little Lisettes

I'm so delighted that I got these dresses (Little Lisette 2063) finished - thanks to KCWC. It doesn't seem much, after a week of sewing, but a few 'inconveniences' such as not enough fabric, and cutting pieces out incorrectly caused some delays!

The pink dress is for my just-turned-6 year old niece, who told me her favourite colours were pink, purple (no surprise!) and orange. My daughter loves spending time with her, so enjoyed helping me decide on fabric. My niece has blue eyes and light brown hair, so I wasn't sure if pink was her colour, so the neck binding has some blue stripes which I hope will help.

The neckline binding is a lovely detail on this pattern, and is explained very clearly, especially how neatly the ends are finished.

The buttons are on the opposite sides of the dresses because of a mistake I made in cutting out the bodice pieces for the white dress. It was almost a disaster as I had no more fabric left, so lots of alternative thinking was needed. If I hadn't added lining to the dresses, it might have been much more difficult to fix!

 

The inside, lined with a very lightweight cotton. I flat-felled all the side seams, as well as the ruffle seams so the dresses would be comfortable to wear.

 

 

 

My favourite part, the ribbons which hide the seam allowance of the ruffles. 3 of the ribbons are Farbenmix, and I have forgotten where I bought the one with pink elephants. My daughter picked these out, I think they're her favourite part too.

 

The white fabric is a Hilco cotton from Dotsnstripes, and, if I remember correctly, the polka dot is a Stenzo from Volksfaden

As I only had 1 metre of each of these fabrics, I had to cut the lower 2 ruffles as rectangles instead of curved like the pattern piece. These were cut a few inches wider than the pattern pieces. I also cut the underdress wider at the lower hem, which make the dress more twirly.

 

My daughter had a lot of fun trying these on. This is, she told me, her 'funky dance'!??

 

And the twirling picture .....

 

I really thought all the ruffles would get the better of me, but once I got started they weren't so bad. As I have no ruffler foot, and always get tangled in all the thread from the other methods, I use a method described in Simon Henry's book The Little Best Dress. It just involves pinning the fabric to be gathered in even sections to the smaller piece, and then sewing the seam while pushing the fabric under the foot with a seam ripper, or large needle. It takes a little practice to get the gathers even, but works!

The white floral dress is for my daughter to wear to another niece's First Communion in a week, but the weather is so cold here at the moment, I may just need to sew her a warmer dress!

 

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Hoping to sew a Minoru!

It has taken me ages to decide on fabric for this coat, so I didn't commit to joining the sewalong on the Sewaholic blog ....... yet!
I want to sew a raincoat, but finding a waterproof fabric I liked has taken me weeks of searching, mostly because I didn't want a solid colour, or to use laminated cotton

I had narrowed it down to some lovely Westfalenstof coated cottons or Hilco coated cottons, and finally went for the Hilco which I bought from Dotsnstripes. But OMG!! :-) it's so 'flowery' I'm still not sure I'll be able to carry off wearing this, and maybe I should be making it for my daughter.


I had picked a flannel for the lining, as our weather here is wet and cold. The flannel was prewashed twice, but just this morning I decided I didn't want to use it so found an organic red cotton in my stash that I'm happier with.

The sleeves will be lined with the dots, which is a silk that I got as a Christmas present last year (2010).

Hilco have very good quality fabrics, so I didn't doubt that it was waterproof. I still tested it, just for a picture. It will be interesting to see how it deals with heavy downpours when I'm collecting the children from school.

I considered waterproofing the seams, as I remembered that Dawn from Two on Two off did a post on that a while back, but getting these type of products isn't easy. There is a UK site Pennine that looks good, maybe for a future coat!

So far, I have cut and marked the outer fabric, after raising the elastic placement and shortening the sleeves.
Hopefully I'll get to sew it before I chicken out and decide that flowers are not 'me'! Pin It Now!