After purchasing a vintage quilt back in the fall, and finally getting past the guilt of cutting it up, I made the quilted coat that I have been dreaming of for months.

This project has been a labor of love…and frustration. Has the end result been worth it? Definitely! But it was touch and go there for a while.

I’m not usually the first one to a trend. If I like something, I don’t jump on the bandwagon until most people have gotten off. But that’s how I know I really love something and that I’m not adding something that’s simply trendy.

As with every other sewing project this year, I’ve taken my sweet time with this one. I put a lot of pressure on myself last year to complete projects as quickly as possible which made me dread sewing towards the end of the year. Picking up a project and working only when I want to has been much better for me this year. I also think it’s a more sustainable way to approach adding things to my wardrobe as well.

I’m almost 4 months Into not buying any new or used clothes this year, and although I am “allowed” to make clothes, I didn’t want to use that as a way to still keep adding lots of “new” things to my wardrobe. It’s easy to replace one habit with another, as I have done with thrifting in the past (using it in place of shopping fast fashion brands) so I want to only add a few items to each capsule wardrobe…either ones that I need or really want to make, like this coat.

I have a couple of quilted coats already but they were all ones that I have thrifted over the past few years. I really wanted one that I had made myself with a vintage quilt.

The Making of a Quilted Coat

1. The material – A Vintage Quilt

I found this quilt back in October at a local antiques shop. I loved it at first sight but at $80, I had no clue if that was good for a vintage quilt. So I didn’t buy it initially.

Once I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and I knew that it would be perfect for a quilted coat. So I did a little research on Ebay, as well as asking about the price on Instagram and came to the conclusion that it was a good buy.

So, I called the shop and the lady remembered me and the quilt (since there hadn’t been a tag attached, she had to look though her listings to find the price). I asked her to hold it for me which she kindly did.

Once I bought it, I brought it home and washed it and hanged it to dry…

And then it sat in my closet. Even though I had planned to make a quilted coat from it, my indecisiveness over the perfect pattern and mounting guilt over cutting into such a beautiful vintage piece, coupled with my fear of screwing it up put a major delay in my plans. One that lasted 6 months!

Finally, in February, I got my butt in gear and made a plan!

2. The Inspiration

I had looked at a lot of great coat patterns, but none of them felt quite right. This got me to thinking about the coats that I already owned and what I liked about them. I knew I was looking for a coat that was more suited to transitional weather (lightweight, wouldn’t necessarily need closures).

One of my absolute favorite is a plaid wool coat that I found secondhand on The Real Real last fall. I just really love the boxy shape of it and I knew that it would be the perfect shape for a quilted coat.

I figured that I would have to trace this coat to make a pattern, but while I was looking at vintage patterns one evening on Etsy I came across the perfect one…New Look 6112, version 2 (yellow below).

It had a statement collar, dropped sleeves and front pockets. Everything I was looking for.

3. Making the quilted coat

1. Cutting the pattern pieces

Things started off pretty well. I cut the 2 front pieces, the back pieces, the sleeves and the collar. There were a few other extra pattern pieces but I left those out as I had planned on the coat being reversible.

I really loved the scalloped edges of the quilt and I wanted to keep as much of the original beauty as possible so I decided to use the edges of the quilt as the edges of the coat wherever possible. This also worked out well for me in terms of work as I wouldn’t have to bind any of these edges.

2. Sewing and binding (or more accurately, unbinding)

After I had attached the front and back pieces, I decided to bind the raw edges with some cotton tan fabric that I had tried to match as closely to the original binding as possible. I used the sewing machine and tried to make the lines as straight as possible. Honestly, I had to pick it back quite a few times, which led to a lot of frustration. And a lot of having to put it down and leave it.

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In the end, I didn’t like how the binding looked. To me, it felt sloppy and not something that I was proud of.

So I decided to take off all of the binding, take the pieces apart and do French seams on everything. I felt like that would give me more control and the end result would look a lot cleaner.

And it does. I’m happy with how the French seams look and I feel proud of them.

This was my first time trying to do bounded seams and it simply didn’t work for me this time.

3. Adding the collar

Once the sleeves were attached, I moved on to the collar which proved to be another obstacle.

Firstly, I made an error in cutting the collar. I was trying to use the corner pieces of the quilt and then I was going to sew them together at the middle but I forgot to account for the seam allowance. So I cut another piece out and I was just going to bind the ends.The collar that I had cut didn’t seem to fit on the coat correctly. This may have been because I chose to leave out some elements of the original pattern. So I cut it down. I still couldn’t make it work.

It was at this point that the coat started to feel less and less like the pattern.

This led to me changing the collar design altogether. Since the collar was purely decorative, I went back to the original pieces that I had cut and decided to do a half collar on either side, with a gap at the back. I was happy with this because it meant that I could use the quilt corners and give the coat even more character.

I did use my sewing machine to sew on a binding to one edge of the collar but I was able to control the stitch much better because it was so short. I was happy with the outcome…although I won’t rule out the possibility of picking it back and hand sewing it someday.

4. Making adjustments

I had a hard time fitting one side of the collar so I had to do some trimming. Once I was able to make both sides even, I didn’t like how the collar was standing. I think if I were adding closures it would have been good. But I had decided that closures would take away from the beautiful scalloping at the front. So I did a little more trimming.

Once the collar was fitting how I wanted, I made some bias tape with the tan fabric and added it along the entire length of the collar. I didn’t even attempt to machine sew it. Although I knew it would take a while to do both sides of the collar (it did!), I also knew that I’d be much happier with the end result (I was!).

The Final Product – The Quilted Coat of my dreams

This coat didn’t happen quickly. And that’s ok. I learned a lot. I got to move away from the pattern and make it feel more like my own. I wasn’t sure how things were going to go a lot of the time, but like a lot of other projects that have been like this, I love the end result.

I didn’t end up adding the pockets. Because of the print and limited material, I wasn’t able to perfectly match up the prints and even though the mismatched pockets may have ended up being cool I knew that it would be something that would bother me. I may add them to the inside at some point, but for right now, I’m good.

Side 1 – “The Colorful Side”

Side 2 – “The Neutral Side”

What side is your favorite?

Have you ever made a quilted coat before? If so, how did it go?

Until next time,

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