Coat Re-Fashion Project - Sustainable September 2025

The vast majority of sewing projects that I work on are patterns that I’ve bought and I’m making them from scratch.  I very rarely take an existing piece of clothing and alter it, so this coat refashion was an exciting one! 

I bought this coat several years back now and I knew at the time that it was big on me.  I think I was trying to embrace the ‘over-sized’ trend and I liked the colour of it.  However, unfortunately, it never really left my wardrobe!  I kept trying it on and then putting it back; I even took it on a weekend away with me and my friend ended up wearing it.  I eventually came to the conclusion that it drowned me and decided I would get rid of it.  But then came the decision of what I would do with it – give it to a charity shop, try and sell it on Vinted?  And then came the light bulb moment that as well as being a coat – it was actually a large piece of fabric! 

So there started my first proper re-fashion project!  I needed a small ish project whose pattern pieces would fit into the coat fabric that was available and I came across the Sonny Jacket pattern from Tilly & The Buttons in my collection of patterns to make.  I wasn’t sure that it would work from the start but decided to throw caution to the wind and try it anyway.  What was there to lose?  A coat that hung in my wardrobe never being worn!

I firstly cut out my paper pattern pieces from the Sonny pattern and roughly held them up to the various panels of the coat to check that I would have broadly enough fabric.  Once I was happy that I did, I went ahead and started the process of unpicking the coat seams.  I thought that was going to take me forever but it turned out to be a relatively quick process.  Once all of the panels were separated out, I allocated each one to a Sonny pattern piece and cut them out.  Miraculously I managed to cut the majority of them out whole and only had to piece together the collar and the facings.  I did a zig zag stitch across two random pieces of the fabric a few times to get pieces large enough for those bits which seemed to work out fine.

Once all of the Sonny pattern pieces were cut out, I knew that the project was going to work which was a great feeling!  I then just sewed them all together according to the Sonny Jacket pattern instructions.  The fabric of the coat is a polyester knit and I toyed with the idea that I would just leave the sleeves and the bottom of the jacket unhemmed because the fabric wasn’t fraying.  In the end I did turn them both up once and stitched them down.  I also deliberated on how to close the jacket or whether to have a closure at all. 

I had some nice gold buttons that I had salvaged from another piece of clothing a few years ago and placed them on the jacket in the button locations and thought they went really well.  However the shank on them is quite short and I hesitated adding them on as I thought they might be too small – the jacket fabric plus the facing is quite thick in that area and I thought it might be too much. 

I wore the jacket out without any buttons that weekend to see how it looked and then decided to do a test buttonhole with the gold buttons on a piece of scrap fabric.  It worked fine so I sewed the buttonholes on the jacket, added the buttons and the project was complete! 

I’m so pleased with how the jacket came out – I have worn it lots already and it's really satisfying to know that it used to be something else and I’ve given it a second life!