Taylor Trench Progress Report 1

As part of my sewing plans for the year I have divided up some of the steps involved in sewing up my Taylor Trench.  In the last post I included all my materials and planning.  I have everything that I need ready now, and have started some of the pre-prep work for the coat.  I have spread the tasks for this coat across the next few months.  I don’t want to overload myself, or end up rushing it so I’m planning to have all the final touches complete in time for autumn.  I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t fit my planned size very well at the moment anyway!

The first steps have been relatively simple, but also a little time consuming.  I have pre-washed and shrunk my lining fabric, and as I explained before I wanted to make this coat a little warmer by quilting the lining to some thinsulate, much like Lauren from Guthrie and Ghani did with her Kelly anorak.   I don’t need all the pieces of lining to be insulated, so I tried to work out how much quilting I needed to do by laying out the pattern pieces that I did need on the fabric and measuring along.

Quilting the two fabrics together is a very slow process!  I decided on a 1.5 inch diamond grid pattern, and used a walking foot and guide to try to keep it even.  I found that the layers ‘stick together’ pretty well by themselves because the backing of the thinsulate is almost like cotton wool.  I did use some extra pins and safety pins to keep them from moving about during sewing, though I didn’t need loads.  It was pretty tricky manipulating such a large piece of fabric on my domestic machine and sewing table.  I think next time I would be tempted to send it in to my local quilting shop and get them to do it for me.

I looked at a few different thread colour options for the quilting, but in the end I settled on simple white.  Pragmatically, I already have a massive reel of white cotton, so I was ready to go, but I also didn’t want the quilting to detract from the print in the fabric.

It took absolutely ages to get the fabric all quilted and prepped.  I was expecting it to be slow, but I do think it will be totally worth it in the end.  The quilting is definitely not perfect, but I doubt anyone would ever notice.  I did invest in a better walking foot partway through which helped enormously.  I had been using a cheap unbranded one, but the actual Brother foot and guide was just so much better at drawing the fabric through evenly.

Next steps are to cut all the pieces from both my lining and my outer fabric, which will be another time consuming part because there are quite a few pieces.  I’m really looking forward to actually getting to the sewing though now!

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