Henry VIII coat with ecclesiastical embroidery

The embroidery had been in my possession for years and I ad never known what to do with it. It had been given by the Garrison church to friends, back in the late 70s or early 80s, who were working in school theatre productions.

That same year I got a couple of huge, very good quality, dark brown velvet curtains on a thrift market. Teddy, the master of dying, was so kind to dye all that velvet black for me and I found myself with meters of lovely, thick, jet black velvet without knowing what to make out of it.

It's a well known "secret" that I absolutely love patterns and often but patterns to just simply have them, because I rifle through them and imagine all the wonderful things I could make out of them.

Simplicity used to make a lovely Henry VIII style coat, albeit non authentic, but these things don't matter for pure costumes for the sake of costumes or, indeed as in this case, for clothes to wear everyday.

I also found a few meters of yellow taffeta lining and while I dislike yellow greatly in clothes, it would fit perfectly as a lining. Thus it came to pass that I visited Teddy in winter 2003 and set about cutting the velvet in his sewing room. I left such a mess with all the black fluff, even after hoovering most carefully, some was still flying around. Ooops.

It took quite a while to figure out how best to cut the long strips of embroidery on red velvet, so that they would fit onto the pattern. With a lot of careful shuffling around of pattern pieces, piecing fabrics together and adding a gold trim I had found in York, it now looks as if it were meant to be that way I should think.

I love the coat and the amounts of comments it gets is quite astounding.