Monday, June 14, 2010

long lost baby pea coat (butterick 4009)



The inspiration for this project sort of came from two places. Originally, I wanted a beautiful coat to go with my daughter's blessing dress.

More recently, I was reading this post on Made by Heidi, in which she talks about living on a student budget and doing all her crafting out of her current supplies in her craft closet. I started to think about the dark corner of the house in which I keep all of my crafting supplies (which is, in all fairness, just the floor space underneath the shelves in my linen closet.) I realized that it was starting to get a wee bit crowded in there and could use a cleaning.

I began pulling out bag after bag after bag of yarn, hair clip supplies, leftover scraps, thread, etc, etc, etc. The floor space in the linen closet started to seem more like Mary Poppins' bottomless carpet bag than ever before. While I'm not crazy enough to try to last a full year using nothing but the supplies in my closet, I also didn't want things to get so out of hand that my children will eventually have to dig my crazy self out of my crafting world to put me in a home for the mentally unstable . . .

One of the things I found at the bottom of the mess were the supplies for this baby pea coat. I had planned on making this coat for my daughter when she was about two months old--she is now 2-1/2 years old (oops.) This pattern is so old that it is out of print. Now seemed like as good a time as any to make it.



It is a beautiful, fully-lined coat. It required a lot of hand stitching (slip stitching,) but when I finished it, I was glad that I decided to sew it even though my daughter is way too big for it now.

Turns out there might be a reason the pattern is out of print. I cut out a size small, which should be roughly a 3-6 month size coat. I followed the directions and seam allowances exactly, yet it is actually the same size as a 12 month coat.

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