Patching a coat of many colors (that my mama bought for me)

For a couple of years now, I've been thinking that it'll soon be time for a new winter coat.  My current coat has been getting raggedy in places: over the shoulder (where the strap of my planner bag rubs against it), and in places where the fabric folds over (along the tops of the pockets, along the front flap of the jacket).  Also, the openings for the pockets are not quite as comfy as I'd like: instead of having the openings toward the sides, the pockets are shaped like square letter U's, with the openings directly on top, which means I can't walk around with my hands in the pockets. 

It's no surprise that the jacket is getting raggedy -- it's about three decades old.  Rather, it's amazing that it's held on this long.

I think it was when I was in grad school that I got it (but it might have been college).  I'd gone back home over break, and my sisters suggested we go shopping together.  My mom said, "you should go to Sassafras!  It's a great store!".   My youngest sister, who has always had more chutzpah than the rest of us, chimed in, "Mom, why don't you come with us . . . and bring your credit card?"   And we all thought this was so funny and happy, and she did.  While we were at the store, my mom found this coat and asked, "Snough, if I buy this coat for you, will you wear it?"  I said yes.  The coat was $200, back in late-80's/early 90's prices.  

This story is so much unlike much of the rest of my family history.  We were a frugal bunch, my family; recreational shopping wasn't really our thing.  We were much bigger on throwing ourselves into household chores and then getting outdoors for hikes or finding ways to be in the community.  We were also a geeky group: that car of four women had four people who'd have Masters and/or PhDs in math, physics, or operations research.  It was probably on this outing, if I remember correctly, that we had an intense and enjoyable discussion about integrals involving the arctangent.  

My coat, from the back.

So, this coat: It's a coat of many colors; it's a lot of fun that way.  I wore it (not exclusively) for thirty-ish years, and I get a lot of people complimenting me on it.   I added reflective strips around the sleeves, so I feel even safer walking at night, and I patched a few rough spots.  Of late, though, my husband has tut-tut-tutted because of the frayed seams, and I fantasize about better pockets.  I started saving up for a new coat -- not saving up money, but rather saving scraps of upholstery fabric, so I can make a new one.   For all that the coat has been wearing out, I love how it's multicolored, so I've gatheres swaths of many colors.  (Did I swoon over Amanda Gorman's yellow coat at the inauguration?  Why, yes, I did!).  I just needed the time to design and pull together all those pieces.

Late November this year, I pulled out Ye Olde Coat again, and my guy shook his head a bit, but having no alternatives I bundled up it in and Went Places.  And wherever I went, I got more of that old familiar gushing: "I love that coat!".  One relatively new faculty member followed that up with this story:

One day I was driving with some other people, and they said, "oh, there's 'Snough!", and I asked, "How can you tell?  It's dark, and she's walking the other direction, so you can't even see her face!", and they said, "The Coat!".

I get so much love on this coat, that last week I decided I'd try fixing just the few small things that bothered my guy and me.  I used some of that upholstery fabric to create a new shoulder patch, and also for new trim along the front (now, no-longer frayed) edge of the coat.  The blessing of having a Coat of Many Colors is that one new color blends in, so to speak, even if it doesn't blend in.

I also carefully used my seam ripper to detach a bit of the outer edge of each pocket.  I snipped off the top outer corner (recall, the top edges of the pocket were frayed anyway), added trim to the edges, and reattached the pockets so that they are a tad smaller but much more hand-friendly.

The corners of the pockets I snipped off. 
The edges along the bottoms in this picture were the tops of
the pockets, and you can see how frayed they are.  

The wrap-up?  About 15 minutes of cutting, pinning, and stitching led to a coat-of-many-colors with just a few more colors.  The frayed portions are covered with new trim; the pockets are hand-friendly.  All of this work was done with materials I scavenged (upholstery fabric leftover from chairs that my office building no longer owns, denim from the pants leg of jeans that had developed embarrassing holes elsewhere).  

The new front strip doesn't look at all out of place,
and now I can put my hands in the pockets.  Yes!

This coat has so many layers of memories for me.  There's the story of how my sisters and mom and I went on an expedition, with my mom's spontaneous offer, for one thing.  My memories of my mom -- like the colors of this coat -- are highly varied.  If you ask me the first few words that come into my head to describe her, I might have said "organized; tyrannical".  There were many other words to describe her, and this coat helps me remember those other sides of her, too, and I'm constantly grateful for that.  

Also, I love delighting my guy.  I showed the patches and repairs to him, running them by him for his perceptions of good taste (after all, he's the only, only person who'd made tsk-tsk comments about the condition of the coat), and he was delighted, cracking jokes about how this would extend the life of the coat for another few decades.   

And finally, although I don't think of myself as a slave to public opinion (hardly), I also try hard to live my frugal life in a way that doesn't offend or drive other people crazy.  The fact that this crazy old coat makes so many people happy, well, that makes me super happy, too.