Monday, November 24, 2014

Seeing Red: The Ten Eyck Coat

This past week finally despite laziness and ongoing construction in my sewing room I starting work on the Ten Eyck Coat.


On a side note: The construction amounted to rearranging the upstairs duct-work somehow, creating an attic access and a new return vent, and blowing insulation into the attic. We also had to install a new thermostat for the upstairs since it stopped working. All this just after it turned cold. Insulation is messy! And it was all over my sewing room!  And now I know it costs $35 an hour to rent an insulation blower.

Inside of the cuffs. Why can't the underside of my buttonholes look as good as the outside?

The scarlet wool for this coat is such a blindingly bright red, with such shiny brass buttons, this really is a statement coat, and very striking. The pictures don't show how bright it really is; it would be impossible to ignore in a crowd. Ben Franklin probably invented sunglasses because he saw Andres Ten Eyck, wearing this coat.


I don't understand why the coat has these triangles on the sleeves. The only reasons I came up with is either it had to be pieced, or it's just a design element. Anyway, the coat had it so I added it to mine.


The cuffs have three buttons each. 


After closer inspection(ie, staring at the poor quality photos for a long, long time) it looks like the coat has a small collar under the lapel, so I added that too. The back of the coat has the two side pleats stitched closed with a decorative button each, while the center pleat is left split with the lining stitched down along the raw edge. It's a basic shape, but still with lots of those buttonholes, which I am taking with me on Thanksgiving vacation this week!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am working on the Ten Eyck genealogy (at about 140,00 descendants of Coenradt, who was among the first 1000 or so Niew Amsterdam colonists, so far.
The Ten Eyck coat, in the loyalist museum, is on my bucket list. Love to know a little more about your connection to it.
godux10@msn.com