Quilt Coat Class at AQC 2024

Well just WOW! What a two day jaunt that was to AQC (Australasian Quilt Convention)

Full of meeting new friends, catching with old friends, learning new things, sharing skills, cheering people on and of course, some stash enhancement!

My Quilt Coat class with Lorena Uriarte was amazing. There was lots of preparation work and a bit of apprehension about doing something new and way out of my comfort zone!

My first day didn’t start quite as I had planned…. When Lorena got around to talking to me about my quilt coat (there was 20 people in the class!) and discovered I planned to make the Hovea Coat, she gently suggested that it wasn’t the most flattering of patterns and not a great fit. Eek! Luckily she had quite a few quilt coats there to look at and try on in some different sizes and she convinced me that the Tamarack Jacket would be better choice for me. (pattern is from Grainline Studio)

And when I tried it on (this is Lorena’s Taramack above which even though it wasn’t quite my size), it just felt right. Comfortable, no gaping bits. The toile (the name given to a sort of mock up version of a pattern, mine was in the traceable thin fabric paper sort of thing) I had made of the Hovea coat was really bulky around the shoulder / sleeve area – it felt like it needed a mega dart there!

So, a quick online purchase of the Tamarack pattern plus the hood/collar add on and I started tracing the pieces again (with my neighbour’s gorgeous purple pattern weights!). Luckily there was a printed version of the Tamarack coat in the class I could use otherwise I would have been really in trouble!

It was basically 2pm on day one before I started cutting any of my gorgeous fabric out!! Started to feel the pressure!

Making that first cut from my gorgeous fabric was really hard…. definitely a pull up the big girl panties moment! Which I didn’t take a photo of, as I was too busy giving myself a talking to of ‘just do it!’

The first seams were the shoulder seams and then binding them. It was then that the realisation hit me that the 6+ metres of bias binding I had created were all going to have to be hand sewn down ! Argh!

And I just LOVED how my lining (well, double sided coat) turned out… I got the cutting placement just right!

By the end of Day 1 I had shoulder seams bound and the binding sewn onto the bottom of my back piece… with all good intentions of hand sewing this down once I got back to my hotel room.

Hehe…. except I caught up with a friend for dinner and by the time I got back to my hotel my bed was calling my name big time!

This is Lorena’s Dear Jane quilt coat that started her fascination with quilted coats…. it is a stunner!

Day 2 was very much nose down, bum up and working hard! Made the decision to hand stitch the binding down only where it was going to intersect with another seam I had to machine sew… the rest of the binding would be glued down with Roxanne’s Baste-It glue (everyone’s new favourite MUST HAVE notion in the sewing room! We sold out a couple of stalls of every bottle they had!)

Making and attaching the collar was not easy for my very tired brain to get my head around, but Lorena helped me out, including taking these two pictures for me so I could decide which was the collar would be showing!

We decided that the contrast collar looked better! Then I was back to doing more binding all the way around the front pieces until finally about 3:30pm on Day 2 I sewed in a sleeve! Then a second! It was really starting to look like a garment!

The final seam up the side of the quilt coat and all the way along the sleeve to the cuff, binding on and glued down and that was enough to be able to ‘wear’ my coat.

I just LOVE the inside! The Ruby Star Society double border print from Rise (an older collection that I had in my stash) was just perfect for being fussy cut to make the front sections

And the inside back!

During the day, the organisers of AQC had decided it would be a fun thing for us to do a little fashion parade in front of the delegates before the evening’s lecture! Eek. There was more frantic sewing and glueing around the room!

To the strains of Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colours” we all took our turn walking up on stage and doing a turn or two.

There is a link to the video that @intocraft posted of our fashion parade on Instagram… it is in three parts – this is the last part which has me at the end. https://www.instagram.com/p/C5rnxpMvfcr/?igsh=MTdycHFneHExeG44bw== As my mum commented ‘you do love to play it up!’ : )

I was last and got lots of claps when I walked out but when I took my jacket off in what the girls called ‘the flip!’ to show that it was double sided, the crowd went a little crazy and there where oohs and ahhs and oh so many cheers! What a moment and made the hard work over the past two days worth it!

I had to leave straight away to get back home on public transport (and I wore my jacket all the way home!) and even though I was completely exhausted, there was a smile on my face when @thefabrichusband picked me up from the train station at 7:30pm!

There will be another photo shoot once I have all the inside binding sewn down – that was my Saturday recovery day in front of the fire job!

There is another blog post with all my preparation for the quilt coat class and creating the quilted fabric.