Teal green vinyl coat

This coat has been in the making for what seems like ......forever.  I found the material for this coat back in September 2015 and started drafting the pattern for it in October, but it hasn't been smooth sailing.  I'm not overly happy with how the front sits - the bust curve seems to a bit high up my chest and the flare at the bottom is not as defined as I wanted.  Having said that I do love the look of the coat from the back.

When I originally sewed the coat together it was way too tight around my hips,  I used my sloper to draft the top half of the pattern, and then just graded from the waistline to the width I wanted at the bottom, However I didn't account for my hip measurements and it was way too tight in that region.  Unfortunately there was no extra room in the seams to let it out and I was forced to add an extra panel in at the sides.  It tapers from a point under the arms to about 1.5 wide at the bottom.  I didn't have enough material to make this panel in one piece so its in two pieces either side.

My original plan for this coat included a fleece lining for warmth, however once I had the coat plus a fleece lining made I realised that the coat worked best as a rain coat and if I lined it in fleece it would probably be too warm for spring time wear, so in the end I left the lining out.

This change of function also resulted in a change in collar design.  My original plan had a basic stand up collar, however as I now wanted to use it as a rain coat I decided that a hood would be a better idea.

As I didn't have a lot of material left over, and I didn't want to have to go and buy a full meter just for a hood, I cut the hood a bit short and in 4 pieces rather than 2.  Its not the best but it works.

  

 I did decide however that I needed to line the hood at very least as the inside is visible at most times when its being worn.  To line the hood I used a piece of  blue sweatshirt fleece.  I used this same fleece for the pocket bags.

The pockets I've found are too high up the coat and it can be quite awkward getting things into and out of the them.  They are however nice and deep.

The part of this coat that I like the most is the seaming.  Each seam is topstitched giving a beautiful finish.  I found that I had to do this as the vinyl material cannot be ironed and the seams were all very stiff, so by trial and error I found that the best way to finish the seams was to cut them off to 1/4" and topstitch them down.

This is really the only finishing details on the whole garment.  All the hems were left raw as was the edge along the zipper.

Overall, I'm not totally in love with this coat, but it does get worn every rainy day - it works beautifully as a rain coat.  Lots of learning was done during the making of it, so it wasn't a total waste of time.