Behold the incomplete coat. Let me tell you its story.
I started making this coat at the beginning of June, and got as far as constructing the outer shell of the coat and pinning together the facing and lining pieces before I got too frustrated and shoved everything into a corner. I couldn't make sense of some of the instructions (I expect because I'd never made a coat before and so didn't have a decent base of "this is how it normally works" to start from), I lost my sleeve lining pattern piece and then ran out of lining fabric, I was really concerned about the way it was fitting. I was determined enough to make it work that I went back to Fabric Land and bought the last of the remaining purple coating to make the matching cape, but not determined enough to do the work. The bits of coat got put into a bag, taken from Old House to Temporary House to New House, and still no more got done to it.
When I was making my September/October project list, I realised that the constant presence of a half-finished coat was getting on my nerves and I needed to finish the thing one way or another. So in late September, the coat pieces and I spread ourselves out on the floor and tried to work out what was going on. My unpicker worked very hard that day. By mid-afternoon, I had a coat with lining mostly attached, and I had to confront the fact that it simply did not fit.
This is what's known as Unimpressed Face.
I don't know if I did something wrong. Honestly, it's quite likely that I did. But what I have doesn't match the pattern envelope at all. The finished measurements of the largest size are supposed to be 47 inches, and the photo has the front of the coat wrapping over to the opposite hip, so I assumed that 47 inches was the hip measurement of the coat when closed to that point. What I appear to have, based on my normal hip measurement, is a coat that is 47 inches edge to edge, so it barely wraps over my hips and looks very strange. I'm actually really hoping I did something wrong, because if that's the way it's meant to be then nobody in the largest few sizes will be able to get their coat to look the way it does on the pattern. I tried it on my skinny-ass boyfriend who has a good ten inches less hip than me; while we did get to wrap over, it was still pretty tight.
You can see in these two photos that by pulling the coat to the position where it would be fastened, it's so tight that it's making the pockets bulge out. This is not what I want in a coat, and particularly not in a 1920s shaped coat. And if I don't fasten it and just leave it to hang open, it a) is insufficiently warm and b) just looks like I'm wearing a blanket.
BLANKET. Also it looks mega-wonky here, but that's because it hasn't seen even a hint of an iron. And nor will it ever. I'm done with it.
I'm not going to finish this coat. It's straight-up unwearable. I don't like the way it looks worn open, and if I put any kind of closure on it at all it pulls at the hips when I walk. There's just no point in putting the effort in to complete it when I already know it's destined for the bin. I'm quite sad about it. I really wanted this coat, but there's no way I'll be trying the pattern again. Since it's already cut out I will have a go at making the cape (why not have a purple cape, I always say) and just chalk this one up to experience. I bought another coat pattern recently, and I'll be having a go at that next month when I come back from my holiday.
It's all lined and everything. What you can't see is that I got very confused around the neckline area and some of the lining is attached inside out. FAIL COAT. FAIL.
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