Papercut Patterns Sapporo coat in linen

I finally made a Sapporo coat! I feel I’ve been talking about it forever, and admiring other people’s. It’s been a fashionable thing to make within my wee Scottish sewers group.

Because it took me so long, it’s really not very seasonally appropriate, it’s a linen viscose mix so won’t properly be able to wear it til spring. The lining was part of the thimble and threads destash parcel.

The pattern wasn’t the most intuitive to me, I couldn’t work it out from just looking at the pattern pieces at all, and didn’t really understand what was going on until I was going it. The instructions are also fairly brief and not always the clearest. I was really stuck on how you attach the neck facing, but thankfully there is a blog post with step by step photos, so I managed.

There are loads of mistakes in this! I traced this ages ago and somehow managed to miss THREE pattern pieces when cutting out, and then didn’t have enough fabric to cut them all. I had to piece the pieces together, so I have a random extra seam in one of the shoulders, and in the lining on both sides (but the latter doesn’t matter so much). I then cut the pieces lining pieces identically rather than mirror image, so had to do yet more piecing to recut one of them.

The other thing that’s pretty not good about this is the hem. The lining pulls up the hem, so you’re having to go against the gold created by one half of the hem being interfaced. I didn’t realise how awful it really looked until I took these pictures (which is also why you are not getting a proper back view, that side one is bad enough!). I’ve since steamed and pressed it heavily and it seems to be ok, though I don’t actually know what it looks like worn.

The other thing to mention is that the pockets are weirdly small! I would definitely make them larger next time to be able to get my hands fully in. I also interfaced the pockets to make them more stable and would definitely do this again.

So that was quite a lot of moaning, but actually I LOVE this pattern. The construction is so interesting. And I definitely want to make another, without mistakes, now I know how it works!