Ten Eyck Coat Complete

 The Ten Eyck Coat is finished.

What I do, since I don't have a male mannikin, is I take my items to Church on Sunday, find a guy the right size, and take pictures. It looks a lot better than using my oh-so-female mannikin in my poorly-lit sewing room.

 Once I got all the buttonholes done on the front of the lapels, there was just a lot of basic stitching left: all down the back pleats and the hem, and down the raw edges of the lapels.

The little arrow-pointed part of the lapel gave me the most trouble; trying to get it to lie smoothly against the small collar over the slope of the chest and shoulder was finicky. Everything else came together fairly well. If I feel motivated you might see pictures of the inside, eventually.

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!

Custom Orders: The Ten Eyck Coat

I've had in influx of custom orders in the past month that are keeping me busy. Right now I'm working on an 18th C open-front gown. Then I got an order for six pairs of breeches from the Theatre Workshop of Nantucket, meant for their production of Cinderella. After that I got an order for a tailcoat, an Edwardian skirt, more breeches and a waistcoat. With all that and my other two jobs, my order queue is full up through Christmas. Custom orders are nice because they pay more, but they tend to have sharp deadlines. I don't have room to stock a hundred of yards of fabric, so I have to order fabric almost every time I get an custom order. And I'm just so nice that I schedule shipping dates sooner than I should. Or maybe it's just that I have two other jobs that keep getting in the way.

The Andres Ten Eyck Coat.

The tailcoat order in my queue is for a replica of a surviving 18th Century coat that belonged to a Dutch immigrant, a Loyalist during the War for Independence. The coat now lives in the Missisquoi Museum in Quebec.

The coat is scarlet wool with linen lining and brass domed buttons. I already have the scarlet wool and brass buttons, ordered from Wm. Booth Draper(once again, very fast shipping). The linen lining and buttonhole thread are coming from fabric.com. I really wanted to order silk twist for the buttonholes, but at $6 for 22 yards of thread, for thirty buttonholes it would have added roughly another $20 to the material cost.

 The back vent. The rough measurements of the original coat are 40 long, 34 chest, 17 from shoulder to shoulder, and a 26 inch long sleeve- a little bit smaller overall than my client.

Cuff detail.

 Pictures courtesy of the Missisquoi Historical Society. 

For more information about the coat contact Curator Heather Darch via the Missisquoi Historical Society website, or visit the 100 Objects Quebec Anglophone Heritage Network site. Stay tuned! Coat construction starts mid-November.