Children's coat gets upgrade

My youngest son is a real outside kid whose favourite hobby is to dig up worms. It goes without saying that a warm, waterproof coat is an absolute must during the cold winter months. His current coat is the same one as the one from last year, and has seen quite a few adventures. Time for an upgrade!

Identifying the problem areas

A thorough inspection showed that the coat had seen quite some wear and tear. For example: the collar had been chewn right through.

On top of the pockets I detected tears that can only have been made by intensive crawling.

Step 1: the collar

I started with the chewing marks on the collar, by covering them with a whip stitch and with satin stitches.

Voor ik verder ging met de volgende stap, liet ik het resultaat van de kraag even aan onze jongste zien. Ter goedkeuring. Onderschat deze stap in het hele proces niet. Als ‘t meneer niet aanstaat, bestaat de kans dat hij in de toekomst weigert zijn jas nog aan te doen. In het kader van choose your battles (en omdat ik weet dat hij zijn koppigheid van zijn vader heeft geërfd 😉 ) koos ik er al ver op voorhand voor om deze battle met een grote boog te vermijden. Gelukkig zat het wel goed, met die goedkeuring. Meneer zag er zelfs direct de bek van een vogel in. Dus heb ik maar op dat thema verder geborduurd. Letterlijk.

Step 2: the pockets

Since we already had a parrot, I decided to continue the tropical bird theme for the other alterations. On the right pocket, I embroidered a cocketoo. For its crest, I chose to only make the outline, and not fill it up completely. Mainly because these pockets turned out to be more difficult than first expected. I had to make sure not to accidentally sew the pocket shut, and that took quite some wriggling. Apart from that, I had drawn the cocketoo on with a Frixion pen, but the coat's fabric seemed to absorb the ink, making it very hard for me to see where my stitches should be.

For the left pocket I decided to add a toucan. To make sure I'd know exactly where to stitch this time, I drew the toucan on water solvable transfer paper. I pinned this paper on top of the pocket, and got going.

The easy part of using water solvable transfer paper, is that when you're done, you can just rinse the paper away with some water.

The result

The end result was a big hit, with a big hug and a large thank you. Mission accomplished.

Do you have a coat lying around that could do with some TLC?  Feel free to drop me a line, and together we can find a solution.