It's about time!

Done!  Finally!  Whew!  This poor coat has been "in the works" for an awfully long time.  I bought the fabric a few years ago with the intention of making up a coat almost immediately.  Plasticky polyester in a dreary rainy-day colour.  Even bought a pattern at about the same time.  One thing and another...  Then my son asked for a vest with a hood - the "wearable umbrella".  That darn hood took up an awful lot of fabric.  Now I didn't have enough fabric for the coat that I had wanted.  Darn!  Thinking.  Thinking.  Thinking.  Thinking takes up a lot of time.  Early this fall I decided that I was just going to buckle down and get this coat sewn.  It seemed that every pattern that I looked at needed much more fabric than what I had.  Dig, dig, dig in the pattern drawer.  Dug up Vogue 9953.  Easiest coat on the planet - only a front and a back (sleeves already attached).  Layed out the pieces - it fit!  I did have to piece the facings.  Onwards!  But this was turning into an awfully boring coat.  Boring colour  (it does match my brown and green plaid umbrella!), boring style.  It needed at least one redeeming feature, besides the endless rows of topstitching.  Thinking.  Thinking.  More time goes by.  Decided to do something with the collar - probably because I've been watching too many episodes of House of Eliott, and they have the most phenomenal collars on their coats.  The stand-up collar grew.  Still boring.  Let's do some embellishment.  Pintucks!  90 rows (yup - I counted) of pintucks later I had a piece to cut my upper collar from.

Mind you - all other sewing stopped while the pintucks were happening.  Once I had the machine threaded and adjusted for those double needle pintucks, I was not going to mess up those settings for anything.  Very slow going.  That's why I was counting rows - sort of a countdown.
Finally I got to the point of hemming, and did I ever goof.  I thought that I was going to be very smart and stretched the bias interfacing as I was stitching it to the edge of the hem.  This was going to neatly ease in the excess fabric of the A-line skirt.  Wrong!  Not so neat and nice.  Undid that before proceeding with a little more caution.  The  last bugaboo was the buttons, or rather how to do up the buttons.  The pattern actually has a hidden fly placket thingy to hide the buttons.  This was not so convenient on the previous coat made from this pattern, and I really had no extra fabric for extra pieces.  More thinking.  Didn't want stitched buttonholes.  Didn't want buttonholes of any kind.  Wouldn't look right.  Loops!  Self fabric loops didn't work.  The spaghetti strips turned out too fat for the size of buttons that I had picked.  Round elastic at Fabricland just wasn't anywhere near the right colour.  The solution finally came to me at the dollar store.  Hair elastics!  So there I stood at Dollarama, fabric swatch in hand, pawing through endless bundles of hair elastics.  Who knew that there were so many variations on beige and greige in hair elastics!  Not a perfect match, but they had to do.

And now that it's cold and at times snowy - I finally have the raincoat done.  Well, come spring it will be waiting in the front closet for its first outing.

Front close-up

The fabric was at least willing enough to wrap itself nicely around the snap.

These buttons remind me of basketballs.  OK - may-be a bit too much staring at this coat.

Sorry - the lining is just boring grey.  I had lots of it and it worked.  What can I say.