wool options for the school days coat

As you’re planning your fall sewing, here are a few additional ideas for you.

Many of you have been asking about wool fabrics for the School Days Jacket and Coat. If you don’t have a great neighborhood fabric store (and you should feel very fortunate if you do!), shopping on-line for wool coating fabrics can be difficult. The people at Fabric.com have kindly put together a special page for us, showing some of their offerings. I think the double face wool melton would be an especially nice fabric to use, and it comes in lots of great colors!

If your options locally are more limited in color, you might be concerned about using the darker, traditional colors that tend to be most widely available because they may seem too boring. Never fear!

Here are a few samples we made while developing this pattern so you can see that traditional colors don’t have to be dull.

This coat was made with a medium-weight brown- and rust-colored wool herringbone. The fabric weight is probably closer to what you might use if you were making a tweed jacket, and we made the insulated lining with sleeves so the coat can be worn in cold weather. The lining fabrics are all from the Wonderland by Momo collection for Moda. But we added a pop of color with the turquoise binding for a little surprise inside the jacket. You can also see the button tab option (View B in the pattern) used here.

This next coat was one of the first samples I made using a really luxurious wool/cashmere blend in a camel color. (I wish there had been enough fabric to use for a coat for myself!) The lining fabrics are all from Joelle Hoverson’s Cake Rock Beach collection for Moda (which is still available at Purl–I especially love the coral seaweed print.) This coat is one of my favorites. I think it’s simultaneously fun and sophisticated.

And this chocolate brown wool twill is also lined with fabrics from Joelle’s Cake Rock Beach. We used microfleece on the back of the quilted insulated lining instead of making a more traditional quilt sandwich with cotton batting. And I wanted to show you the red elastic loops for buttoning the insulated lining into the coat. It’s another fun little pop of color that picks up the red in the print of the insulated lining.

So don’t feel limited by your options. You can do all sorts of fun things with even darker wool colors!

Here are a couple other fabrics you might want to consider in your shopping.

Denver Fabrics has a beautiful dark red wool/cashmere blend as well as a nice selection of other wool coating fabrics.

Our friends at Waechter’s have several coating fabrics. I especially like the sky blue wool.

Can anyone else suggest some on-line options? Leave your ideas in comments, please.