After breaking yet another coat zipper and clearly not learning my lesson, I set out to make myself a replacement Dinosaur Coat. I’d fallen in love with the Momiji walking jacket from Waffle Patterns and desperately needed one with dinosaurs on it. So the internet was scoured again for dinosaur printed softshell fabric and I landed on some from Takoy. I wasn’t fully sure what the colours would turn out to be, but when it arrived on my doorstep I really liked it. Off to the haberdashery for some new zippers! I tried to line up the dinosaurs so they went around the entire coat and almost matched along the zipper. That seemed to work out quite well.
The pattern works in such a way that you pick the elements that you want to include and follow the relevant instructions for those. I chose to use A: Hood, C: Chest pocket, E: Kangaroo pocket + hand warmer and H: Knit cuff. There are only four adaptations from the original pattern, I think. One is to have larger eyelets on the hood because the ones that were the right size just kept coming loose. The second was to do the pleat on the front pocket to the outside instead of the inside, mainly because I couldn’t find a way to have the dinosaurs show nicely with the inside pleat. Three, add some elastic to the inside of the chest pocket to keep my wallet in place, because I didn’t measure it beforehand. And lastly, to add a hanging loop to the inside when attaching the lining hood to the neckline.
The coat is lined with some fairly thick and smooth orange-y fabric that was a close enough colour match to the outside dinosaurs. The pattern comes with separate pieces for the lining. All in all, I’m very impressed with the pattern. The pieces all match up and the instructions all made sense and were very clear. While the project wasn’t even that difficult, it did take me a fairly long time to complete. That was mainly because I was very unsure on how long to make the sleeves. So the two pieces of the project sat on the back of a chair and on the couch for weeks before I decided to just follow the pattern and make nice long sleeves.
There are a few things I would do differently, if I make it again. The first is are to decrease the height of the hood. It’s too big, so I have to scrunch it down a whole lot for it to stay on my head. Second, the pocket opening for the hand warmer pockets is too far down, which means that I never feel secure in putting something else in there as it would probably fall out. The outside pocket pleat also means that if I put stuff in there, I get a massive tummy, but I guess that was all my choice. Lastly, the zipper doesn’t really comfortably close all the way up so it generally ends where the hood attaches to the neckline. The first time I wore the coat, I wasn’t convinced. But it’s been in stable rotation for weeks now and I really love it.
