Last Octo­ber, I made a navy cash­mere and leather coat for one of my dear­est friends. I would not call it a suc­cess. Since this first coat did not turn out as I had hoped, I sim­ply had to design a new ver­sion of the win­ter coat!

The new coat was first going to be an orig­i­nal and mod­ern twist on a par­tic­u­lar vin­tage style. (I’m being vague in my descrip­tion because I hope to even­tu­al­ly make this vin­tage design myself.) But since I did­n’t have time to make a mock-up and test the vin­tage design, I decid­ed to be safe and use the Bur­dastyle 01/2011 #126 Win­ter Coat Pat­tern size 38.

Like the ear­li­er coat pat­tern, this coat pat­tern was not made/designed to have lin­ing. At first I did­n’t think twice and added navy quilt­ed poly­ester lin­ing to the body of the coat and char­coal wool lin­ing to the lapels and collar.

Oh how wrong I was to do this!

Before con­nect­ing the lin­ing lay­ers to the out­er lay­ers, I test­ed the pieces on myself. The quilted/wool lin­ing was much too thick and extreme­ly heavy around the neck (I lit­er­al­ly felt like Scrooge with chains around my neck).

As a result, I swapped the quilt­ed poly­ester and wool lin­ing for a light­weight poly­ester lin­ing. Because the char­coal wool was already heavy in weight and super stiff, in the end I decid­ed not to line the col­lar and lapels.

I also left the col­lar and lapel edges unfin­ished. The wool did­n’t unrav­el at the edges when it was cut and I decid­ed the over­all appear­ance would look bet­ter if I left the edges unfinished.

I hope to have 1 or 2 more coats post­ed before spring!

Stay warm and thanks for reading!