In the early 2000s, there was an odd fabric outlet store that Mom took me to a few times. It had a small front room with bolts of cottons, a smaller area with a selection of hot sauces, a medium back room with mill ends--mostly upholstery weight from the area office furniture factories--sold by the yard, and a large middle room with tables stacked chaotically with mill ends and offcuts of all sizes of the upholstery fabric, as well as odds and ends of other fabrics, all sold by the pound. You can probably guess how much fun I had, digging through everything for ~treasure~
You can probably also guess--correctly--that I still have a lot of those fabrics in my stash. I decided to finally use the big piece of weirdly supple short pile kelly green fake fur to make the coat I'd always wanted to make from it.
There was a slight problem, in that I had, a few years ago, decided that I was probably never going to make that coat, so I then used some of it to make two Minecraft Creeper pillows (one for the kiddo and one for some friends.) That meant that my yardage was short for the view I wanted to make of McCall's 9634 from 1998
(does the shape look familiar? This is the pattern that the doll coat pattern I shared last year was based on--I'd been making doll coats based on this pattern since the pattern was new, but it was only for this project that I finally cut the tissue...)
I wanted to make view B, but there was only enough for--with some finagling--view D. It worked out OK, though, because I am not proportioned like a fashion illustration, so it ended up longer than the illustration makes it seem
Green!
The first issue, of course, was cutting things out. I spread out the irregular piece of fake fur--with its proof that it was 100% pure mill end
and roughly laid out the pattern pieces to see if they could fit. When I found an arrangement that looked like it would work, I grabbed my piece of chalk...and decided I did not want to trace around everything. So: improvised pattern weights it was
although some of the weight was not that practical
I used my extra sharp scissors to carefully cut through only the knit layer of the fake fur--this fur is such a short pile that it probably wouldn't have been a big problem, in terms of cut fibers showing, if I had been less careful, but there would have been so much more green fuzz everywhere.
For the lining, I decided it was time to use some of the ~10 yards of bright green moiré I found for 99¢/yard in a Hancock Fabric in 2000 (I bought the whole roll, because it's me.) For the interfacing, though, I did not, for several reasons, want to use iron-in interfacing, so I got into my deep stash of "this looks too potentially useful to destash but I can't imagine when I would use it" cloth and found a green, heavily synthetic, very lightweight twill.
I had also decided that I was going to transfer the markings for the front shoulder darts to that interfacing, and not to the shell fabric, and sew the darts in both of them as one.
I made pin holes in the pattern piece along the dart marks and used a washable marker to make dots at all those pin holes, then connected those dots. Here's how the darts ended up looking from the outside
Beyond those darts, I actually...assembled this coat almost entirely like I did the doll coat. The only other real difference is that I did machine stitch blind hems on the lining and shell
I had almost convinced myself to hand-stitch the hem of the shell, because I did not want to manhandle three layers of fake fur through the machine for the blind hem, but I realized I could apply some lace and that would man one less layer of fake fur to squeeze under the presser foot. It worked in that "I just want to get this project finished" kind of way.
The rest of the coat is straightforward
and it is exactly as horribly tacky as I had envisioned 💖
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