Winter Coat for Lottie

Little Lottie needed a warm winter coat. It took me til mid-February, but I finally finished!

I made this for her by adjusting one of my favorite patterns, the oliver + s Sunday Brunch Jacket, and referencing you & mie's Mini Boden knock-off tutorial. Love that coat—the Boden original and Cherie's knock off.

The fabric is organic corduroy from Cloud 9 by Elizabeth Olwen. (Go Your Own Way in navy, which I got from Hawthorne Threads). The binding is the solid corduroy from the same line. The lining is cotton, from a previous Elizabeth Olwen line, which I had leftover from Lottie's lullaby layette jacket from last year.

To draft the pattern, I used the sleeve and yoke pieces from the Sunday Brunch Jacket.

I extended the yoke pieces down to be the full length of the coat, and added the little bit of underarm width to fit them with the sleeves. I cut the cuffs off the sleeves later.

Even though Lottie is not quite 18 months now, I used the size 3 since I was going to quilt it.

I drafted the hood by referencing another jacket of Lottie's, and another hooded jacket pattern. I placed it at the collar markings on the Sunday Brunch pattern.

I made a muslin, which fit well, but the finished hood is too small. It isn't very functional, as you can see. Just needed to be deeper with all that quilting. The thick quilting also makes it stiff so it doesn't sit forward on her head. We'll just call it decorative because she usually wears a hat anyway.

For batting, I used three old 100% wool sweaters from the back of my husband's closet. I washed and dried them on hot twice so they would shrink up as much as possible. I wanted it to be extra warm so I used two layers, which made some parts of construction a little tricky, but my walking foot held up pretty well.

Had to work around the elbow holes. :)

Quilting takes a long time. My Clover chaco-liner and beer helped.

I stitched the lining down to some of the seam allowances inside so it would stay put.

Aside from the ill-fitting hood, the one other mistake I made was when I was rounding out the corners around her face after before I put the binding on. In the process of trimming, while trying to be precise with my rotary cutter instead of my scissors, I lost control (it was so darn thick), and cut about an inch and a half into the jacket. Noooooo! I hand stitched it closed and tried my best to hide it—I bet you can't even spot it ;) (near the top of the photo above).

I used vintage buttons from my grandmother's collection. Only had three of them, but I love them, so I decided to just make it work.

I hand finished all the bias binding, which took forever, but definitely looks way better than if I had tried to machine sew through all those layers.

All done!

Thanks for reading!