I’m a little late on my coat because life sometimes gets in the way, but today my mind is set to get the muslin ready for a first evaluation. Before cutting the muslin, I traced my usual Patrones size (42), tracing the pattern in between the available scaled sizes 40 and 44. This is not difficult to do, and I wrote an article about this procedure some time ago: "Tracing in between Patrones patterns". In the following pictures you’ll see that I traced both 40 and 44 sizes in black, kept the common lines and traced the size 42 lines using a blue pencil; all the alterations made previously to cutting the muslin and trying the coat on me were traced using a red pencil. At the present time I have the pattern ready for cutting the muslin and determine if I need further more alterations. NOTE: the pattern has no SAs included.This is a straight coat, no flare so I decided to apply the method for adding walking ease explained in the book “Couture, The Art of Fine Sewing” by Roberta Carr. The book explains how to add the walking ease on a basic front pattern; this coat is a little different; you have to imagine the basic front block pattern that lies within the coat pattern for determining the starting point for your new slightly off-grain front edge. Here are some pictures that illustrate how I performed this alteration:
You can see where is my starting point for tracing the new outer edge that passes at ½ inch from the original front edge at the waistline level and prolongs to the hem:
I always measure my pattern before I cut the fabric (or the muslin, in this case). The only obvious alteration was narrowing the waist, since the original pattern corresponds to a waist circumference of 38 ½ inches (measuring the pattern at the waist level, starting at the CF line and not at the front edge), which is too much (my waist measures 30 ¾ inches). So I reduced the pattern waist circumference by 3 ¼ inches, distributed along the vertical seams:
The back:
The front:
Another thing I did was adding the “turn of the cloth” extra to the upper collar, tracing another pattern using the original as a base start (this is just an estimate, since I will test the turn of the cloth on the final coat):
I did something similar on the front facing, at the lapels.
As a final note on this pattern, I'd like to add that Patrones has a funny way to mark the buttonhole placement: either what they call the Center Front line is not the real center front or the buttons are misplaced further to the edge; observing the original model's picture I think that it's the CF line which is not correct so I traced another CF line a closer to the edge; with the muslin on I'll be able to see if I'm right or not.
And this is it! I hope to show you the constructed muslin as soon as possible!
3 comments:
Hi Tany,
Did you start the walking ease at the collar edge like in the book? I'm having a hard time seeing your drawings to determine where you start to flare out for the ease. My coat has a "bib" so I don't know where to add the walking ease and wanted to see how you handled it on yours.
Lisette, I started at an imaginary round neckline, as per the basic block pattern that originated the coat's final front pattern. It made sense to me that way. In the book you see this alteration made to a basic block and not on a coat with lapels. If you observe the second pattern alteration photo in this post, you'll see that I duplicated the photo and included a black and red line on the right (using paint and starting at an imaginary round neckline above); this was meant to illustrate the original edge (black line) and the new off-grain edge (red line). If you start at the collar base on a lapel collar (or any other low collar line) you'll get a much bigger slope and you'll end up with too much walking ease. This was my interpretation (I must admit this is my first time adding walking ease to a coat); I hope it makes sense to you.
Thanks Tany! It does make sense.
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