A story of my hand woven coat
About two years ago I had to take a several months long break from all handicraft activities due to tendonitis in my hand. When I started to craft again, I soon discovered that the pain returns when I am not careful and knit too much. (This restriction is also the reason, why there are no recent posts about knitting.)
'What should I do with my enormous stash of knitting yarns?' I asked myself.
'Do more weaving!' came the inner answer.
However, one needs only limited number of scarves and bags. Therefore I decided to weave some garments. (I hope this to be the first article of the series.) I love various types of 2/1 twill, which I am able to weave on my small rigid heddle loom with two heddles, not only because of their variability, but also because of the difference between the two sides of the fabric. And this difference I wanted to show off on my coat with its turned cuffs, collar and lapels. Here is the drawing of my original plans and the sample of the fabric:
I made the sample to estimate the shrinkage of the fabric, but I hoped to use it as the smallest piece of fabric 10 cm wide and 1 meter long. Based on my previous experience I expected the shrinkage to be 2 cm width-wise, and so I wound 12 cm wide warp. To my surprise, the width of the sample did not changed after washing. I attributed it to specific characteristics of the yarn I had no experience before, and left out this allowance in other pieces, except the widest one, where I added 1 cm - just to be sure. However, this time all pieces of fabric shrank in width after wet finishing: 2 cm each (just as I expected originally), except the widest piece, which shrank from 37 cm to 32 cm. (It should have been 36 cm wide.) I had not enough yarn for another wide piece, so I re-calculated my pattern and instead of using the sample I wove another piece of fabric 15 cm wide (final width!) and 1 meter long, for side panels of the body and sleeve gussets, and another one 8 cm wide, for a new collar.
After wet finishing the latest pieces, the most dreaded moment came - cutting the fabric.
(Meanwhile, I decided, without any particular reason, not to cut the rectangle meant for gores of the skirt in two exact halves, as shown in the diagram, but to move the intended seam to the back by cutting one gore as a triangle.)
I have read many advices from the people sewing something from hand woven fabrics - how they strengthen lines of future cuts by strips of iron-on interfacing or by zig-zag stitching, but theirs were generally complex patterns, whereas I needed to cut my narrow strips of fabric mostly into rectangles, the only exception (beside the shoulder area and neckline) being the above mentioned gores. Few years ago, I already made a medieval dress from a hand-woven fabric and had no problems with the straight cut of gores. For this reason I did no preparations this time either. I forgot that characteristics of the different fabrics vary. The fabric for the coat was stretchier on bias than my previous fabric for the dress, and the straight diagonal line tended to turn into a curve during pinning and basting. Therefore I decided change the pattern again and to join each diagonal cut with the straight selvedge.
By the laws of geometry, the diagonal line (hypotenuse) is longer than the straight one (leg of the triangle). This required the back of the coat to be slightly longer than the fronts, which I achieved by moving shoulder seams to the back, by cutting the neckline in the front lower and cutting no neckline at the back. (If I had known what troubles it will bring when hanging the coat on a hanger, I would have left the seams where they should be and rather cut the fronts few centimeters shorter.)
Having solved the problem with the gores, I turned my attention to sewing the upper part of the body, where only selvedges occurred. Originally, I meant to whipstitch them together to make the seams inconspicuous, but after the fabric shrank, ugly black weft loops protruded from my initially neat selvedges. (Probably the result of different shrinkage rates of warp and weft yarns.) Therefore I changed my plans yet again: I sewed the selvedges together with 1 cm seam allowances, as if they were raw edges, and then felled them. The original pattern was generous enough to allow this change, at least according to my calculations. Nevertheless, after sewing the pieces together, the fronts barely met. Bye-bye, buttons! (Without buttons it won't be a proper coat any longer. How should I call it now?)
I do not know, whether moving the shoulder seams to the back or the wrong ratio between the widths of the collar and lapels caused this, but after sewing the collar to the back of the body, the front corners of the collar met the corners of the lapels, instead of creating notched lapels. Too tired to bother about it anymore, I sewed them together in this position, and later hid the raw edges of the fabric on both side by a narrow tape.
Even though it is not depicted in my original drawing, I always intended to make sleeves with caps, but their shape was to be decided by trial-and-error process. Of course, I made mock-up sleeves from commercial fabric first, before cutting the hand-woven fabric. Because of the narrower width of the fabric due to shrinkage, the gussets reach almost to the elbow, instead of small armpit gussets, which were drawn in the original diagram. Seam allowances in the lower part of the sleeves are the only ones in the whole garment, which were ironed and felled to both sides, to avoid the bulk of the fabric at the apex of the gusset. Otherwise, both allowances were felled to one side only, to make seams stronger.
After all the changes, the final pattern looks approximately like this:
The last two stages consisted of lining the coat and trimming all the raw edges and ugly selvedges with the tape. As I did not like any of commercial trims (neither polyester nor cotton looked right next to wool of the coat), I wove the trims myself as well. With this, the coat was finally finished.
I made too many mistakes for this text to be meant as instructions or bragging. But I hope it will help other people, who would like to make a similar garment, not to repeat my errors. Besides being a warning it can also serve as an encouragement, to show that despite all the troubles and changes it required, the result can be not only wearable, but also pleasing. And unless you tell everybody - like I did just now - nobody needs to know what went wrong. 😊
'What should I do with my enormous stash of knitting yarns?' I asked myself.
'Do more weaving!' came the inner answer.
However, one needs only limited number of scarves and bags. Therefore I decided to weave some garments. (I hope this to be the first article of the series.) I love various types of 2/1 twill, which I am able to weave on my small rigid heddle loom with two heddles, not only because of their variability, but also because of the difference between the two sides of the fabric. And this difference I wanted to show off on my coat with its turned cuffs, collar and lapels. Here is the drawing of my original plans and the sample of the fabric:
 |
| I forgot to write the note about the fronts: width 20cm: 2x100cm = 200cm |
I made the sample to estimate the shrinkage of the fabric, but I hoped to use it as the smallest piece of fabric 10 cm wide and 1 meter long. Based on my previous experience I expected the shrinkage to be 2 cm width-wise, and so I wound 12 cm wide warp. To my surprise, the width of the sample did not changed after washing. I attributed it to specific characteristics of the yarn I had no experience before, and left out this allowance in other pieces, except the widest one, where I added 1 cm - just to be sure. However, this time all pieces of fabric shrank in width after wet finishing: 2 cm each (just as I expected originally), except the widest piece, which shrank from 37 cm to 32 cm. (It should have been 36 cm wide.) I had not enough yarn for another wide piece, so I re-calculated my pattern and instead of using the sample I wove another piece of fabric 15 cm wide (final width!) and 1 meter long, for side panels of the body and sleeve gussets, and another one 8 cm wide, for a new collar.
After wet finishing the latest pieces, the most dreaded moment came - cutting the fabric.
(Meanwhile, I decided, without any particular reason, not to cut the rectangle meant for gores of the skirt in two exact halves, as shown in the diagram, but to move the intended seam to the back by cutting one gore as a triangle.)
I have read many advices from the people sewing something from hand woven fabrics - how they strengthen lines of future cuts by strips of iron-on interfacing or by zig-zag stitching, but theirs were generally complex patterns, whereas I needed to cut my narrow strips of fabric mostly into rectangles, the only exception (beside the shoulder area and neckline) being the above mentioned gores. Few years ago, I already made a medieval dress from a hand-woven fabric and had no problems with the straight cut of gores. For this reason I did no preparations this time either. I forgot that characteristics of the different fabrics vary. The fabric for the coat was stretchier on bias than my previous fabric for the dress, and the straight diagonal line tended to turn into a curve during pinning and basting. Therefore I decided change the pattern again and to join each diagonal cut with the straight selvedge.
By the laws of geometry, the diagonal line (hypotenuse) is longer than the straight one (leg of the triangle). This required the back of the coat to be slightly longer than the fronts, which I achieved by moving shoulder seams to the back, by cutting the neckline in the front lower and cutting no neckline at the back. (If I had known what troubles it will bring when hanging the coat on a hanger, I would have left the seams where they should be and rather cut the fronts few centimeters shorter.)
Having solved the problem with the gores, I turned my attention to sewing the upper part of the body, where only selvedges occurred. Originally, I meant to whipstitch them together to make the seams inconspicuous, but after the fabric shrank, ugly black weft loops protruded from my initially neat selvedges. (Probably the result of different shrinkage rates of warp and weft yarns.) Therefore I changed my plans yet again: I sewed the selvedges together with 1 cm seam allowances, as if they were raw edges, and then felled them. The original pattern was generous enough to allow this change, at least according to my calculations. Nevertheless, after sewing the pieces together, the fronts barely met. Bye-bye, buttons! (Without buttons it won't be a proper coat any longer. How should I call it now?)
I do not know, whether moving the shoulder seams to the back or the wrong ratio between the widths of the collar and lapels caused this, but after sewing the collar to the back of the body, the front corners of the collar met the corners of the lapels, instead of creating notched lapels. Too tired to bother about it anymore, I sewed them together in this position, and later hid the raw edges of the fabric on both side by a narrow tape.
Even though it is not depicted in my original drawing, I always intended to make sleeves with caps, but their shape was to be decided by trial-and-error process. Of course, I made mock-up sleeves from commercial fabric first, before cutting the hand-woven fabric. Because of the narrower width of the fabric due to shrinkage, the gussets reach almost to the elbow, instead of small armpit gussets, which were drawn in the original diagram. Seam allowances in the lower part of the sleeves are the only ones in the whole garment, which were ironed and felled to both sides, to avoid the bulk of the fabric at the apex of the gusset. Otherwise, both allowances were felled to one side only, to make seams stronger.
After all the changes, the final pattern looks approximately like this:
 |
| Again I forgot something. This time the collar is missing. |
The last two stages consisted of lining the coat and trimming all the raw edges and ugly selvedges with the tape. As I did not like any of commercial trims (neither polyester nor cotton looked right next to wool of the coat), I wove the trims myself as well. With this, the coat was finally finished.
