Handwoven Coat

It's been a few months, since my last post, but I've been really busy with creation of my biggest project, so far.  Creating coat, from selecting of threads, weaving it, until the final design, draping, sewing and fitting it, without any previous training in any of this, was enormously hard and challenging task. After almost three months of work, including hours of digging trough library books and internet, I finally designed and fit one large piece of woven fabric into the wool coat. Here is my result:

Front

Back

The process

from weaving to the final cut and sewing

The most complicated part was fitting and using the fabric that I made to design shape of the coat that will use 5 m of fabric and not a centimeter more. It was actually 4.5 m at the end since I previously made a shirt for my daughter from it. 

Library really helped in discovering designing your own pattern. 

Cutting hand woven fabric and then sewing it, without any ripping and losing of threads was also a tricky job. 

Weaving

I used  6 black rolls of 100% wool thread and about dozen cotton yarns in combination of colors (dark brown, metallic brown - gold, green, blue/purple, purple)

Weaving was done in November on my four shaft loom

Taking handwoven fabric from the loom

Finished weaving taken off the loom was about 5m long

 Designing and fitting I tried few different ways to fit the fabric, and had a real problem, because of the limited amount of fabric.

The collar making This part of fabric (brown and blue strip) was originally destined to be a belt but at last minute it turned out that it would give better accent to the coat as a collar,

Sleeves and buttons Made from two parts, sleeves have also hand made buttons from leftover parts .

Similar are made for the belt at the back, since belt can be detached when not needed

Lining That was , surprisingly the hardest part of all the process, and I didn't know that it will be until the final end. Sewing it to the black leather that I attached earlier was a realy complicated. Finally I just sew it, without any measuring. It was a pure luck that it turned out good.