It's been a wild and crazy Halloween around here. My daughter has gone Hamilton-mad, which led me to purchasing a new sewing machine (hey -- I needed to make button holes) and making some temporary alterations to a wool coat. I was still sewing buttons as we were trying to get out the door on Monday; we never even had time to carve pumpkins this year.
I did however, take some time afterwards to make this assemblage clock using a Tim Holtz Assemblage Alarm Clock. That's what you get for wandering around Michaels looking for gold buttons....
If you'd like a step-by-step, you can get that on ScraPerfect's blog today. In addition to the clock, I raided my drawer of Tim Holtz goodies, including metal charms, letterpress blocks, and baubles. Here's a look at the side:
And here's a bit of info on the Hamilton costume --
Do you know how hard it is to get these guys to stop for a photo??
Anyway -- we found most of the clothing online, but searched through many, many stores to find a coat.
- Boots -- DSW
- Coat -- the Gap's Double-Faced Car Coat. It had the color and length, and was on sale (bonus!)
- Shirt -- via Amazon -- PrettyGuide Women's Stand Up Collar Lotus Ruffle Shirt Blouse (a mouthful!).
- Pants -- via Amazon -- YourStyle Stretchy Slim Fit Skinny Long Jeggings. She rolled these up at the top of the boots. The only problem we had was the dye from the boots rubbed off onto the jeggings and her socks.
Butterick has a men's colonial pattern,#3072, which I picked up at JoAnn's, along with a yard of fabric, fusible interfacing and as many gold buttons as we could grab. If you're making this and have time, I'd suggest looking for buttons online, as you need quite a few and JoAnn's only had a few cards in each style. I used only the collar, lapels and cuffs for this project.
For each part of the pattern, I cut two pieces of fabric and sandwiched the interfacing between them, so I'd have a finished front and back. I shorted the length of the lapels to match her coat/size and added close to 4" to the interior edge of the lapel. This gave me a wide enough lapel so I could pin it on the inside of her coat with tiny safety pins and have it fold over (remember, this is a temporary alteration to the coat). The collar and lapel pieces I lightly tacked together, so the whole piece is kind of like a funky scarf.
We used the lapel patten to help layout where the buttons should be. I used the buttonhole feature on my brand spankin' new machine, and then just attached the buttons by hand on top. In hindsight, I should have sewn them closer to the outside edge of the buttonhole, instead of the middle.
I had hoped the cuffs would stay on their own, but we had to safety pin those as well. There's buttons on the collar and the cuffs, which aren't shown in this photo. Now, all I have to do is convince her to actually wear the coat without them....
And, she's John Laurens, not Alexander. (No, I couldn't tell either...)
