After last week’s grey tweed frock coat, this week I completed work on what chronologically was Tom’s next coat, the brown velvet version which debuted in
Face Of Evil!
This too was a client-led project, and something I hadn’t done before so again the production time inevitably became quite drawn out.
The main challenge was to source a velvet in just the right shade of brown.
I have a couple of suppliers I go to for velvets. It’s from these that I sourced the velvets for the Sixth Doctor Frock Coat, as well as the collar of my
City of Death coat.
One of my UK based supplier has over 40 colours and up till now hasn’t let me down, but for this particular coat the range of browns they stock just didn’t match the screen-worn shade I was after.
Next I looked to a manufacturer I use for corduroy and moleskin who also has a range of velvets, but again their range was too narrow to cover what I was looking for.
Next on my list was a stockist in Germany who have a good range, but it’s difficult sometimes to communicate the shade you want and the range of browns they sent still didn’t have what I was looking for. They also were a little on the heavy side, and given the fluid drape I need for the skirt part of the coat, the cloth really wasn’t suitable.
This left a final option - the various cloth and fabric shops of London’s Soho.
To be honest I don’t like to use Soho for a coats like this, as although you can sometimes find what you want, the stock isn’t repeatable and be a dead-end for future coats. When the
Doctor Who costume designers find cloth here, like off-the-peg clothing used on the series, by the time you find where it came from the last of the cloth as gone and can’t be restocked.
However, I did find a couple of potential fabrics I was happy to show to the client, and sent him swatches. He wasn’t convinced and we went back and forward before agreeing that one of them could work.
Sadly though, by the time I got back to the shop my fears had come true - the last of that shade had been sold!
Despondent I looked through a couple more shops before heading home and chanced upon a PERFECT match - even better than the first choice I had sent the client.
Rather than let it slip through my fingers, I snapped up enough to make the coat, plus a second for myself, which I’ll make at a later date.
I conveyed the results of my trip back to the client and put a swatch in the post - but time was now of the essence and I needed to crack on with making the coat in time for his deadline around Halloween.
To cut the coat, I used a combination of the Eighth Doctor
Night Of The Doctor coat I made, with the grey
Android Invasion coat I did recently.
To be frank - having studied photos of the brown velvet frock coat - I don’t much care for it.
I feel the original was probably made in a rush and wasn’t best thought out or executed.
It has a set of waistline level pockets, but the flap are disproportionately large and look to have been hand sewn in place as an after thought. You can see the hand stitching in this screencap (
see left).
Having discussed this with the client, we agreed to make the flaps large, but just pull back a little from their near comical size, so I used the pattern size of the lower pockets from the
City Of Death and
Android Invasion coats as a guide.
The buttons for this coat are very easy to match as they are simply self-covers buttons.
All I had to do was keep hold of some scraps of cloth left over during sewing, and took them along when I had the buttonholes sewn. The guy that does them also makes covered buttons while you wait!
The tailoring on this coat has been deliberately loose and lightweight. Where I would usually use a horse-hair or calico backing to support the cloth, I have erred on the side of a lighter weight or even a cotton pocketing fabric. This has made the the skirt of the coat hang very limp and the body is a lot looser on the the chest.
Although this doesn’t make it my best work in that regard, it’s given the coat a saggy pre-worn look I feel original had.
In hide-sight there are a couple of changes I might have made to the cut, but as it is the first time I have made this coat you can’t always 100% predict how it will turn out.
I’d love to hear what you think of the coat, as it’s taken quite a while to get to this stage!
This is a full Gundan jumpsuit, which sat underneath the armour on each Gundan robot.
It is in excellent condition with a foam corrugated type material top and silky black arms and legs.
The harness has J.Adams written on the inside.
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