Relining My Vintage Pendleton Coat

This post is long overdue.
I actually relined this coat about a year ago, took photos and meant to write a post on it straight away, but as with a lot of things I didn’t find the time. It has sat on my to-do list for the last year but finally here goes.
I absolutely love this coat. I just about live in it in the winter. It goes with most of my clothes plus I love red so a winner all round.
It had actually been getting a bit threadbare in places around the shoulder where I carry my bag and I’d put a bit of time into darning and repairing that, but the lining was getting into a dreadful state.
It was OK when I was wearing it but if I had to take it off at someone’s house or in a restaurant it definitely wasn’t OK as you can see in the photo below.

I was pretty nervous about starting this job since I really didn’t want to wreck my favourite coat.

I did a lot of research on the internet and decided that to begin with I’d take out half the existing lining and make a pattern from it.  The main body lining was in two pieces anyway so that made it a bit easier.

The instructions I’d found on the internet sort of made sense, but with these sort of things I usually find that they start to make more sense once I’ve started (If that makes sense!)

I took photos at each stage so I could refer back to them to see how it was put together originally.

Once I had removed half of the lining I carefully unpicked all the seams so that I could use the old lining as a pattern to cut my new pieces.

I’d managed to pick-up some lovely black satin from EBay seller Suzie-may. It was very cheap and the quality was great and it’s available in a whole range of colours.

Once I’d dismantled the original lining cutting out the new one was pretty straightforward  apart from the fact that satin is rather slippery stuff to work with!

It was then just a matter of sewing the pieces together which was easy enough.

I wasn’t exactly relishing the ‘putting it all back together’ bit though.

Before I started to sew the lining back into the coat I hemmed the bottom which hangs loose once it’s reattached. Because the side edges are stitched into the side seams of the coat I needed to get that sorted first.
Getting the main part of the lining back into the coat didn’t turn out to be too bad. it was just a matter of stitching it with right sides of coat and lining together and turning it right side out. I’m sure I’m not really explaining this very well. After I’d got the main body lining in I made some swing tacks to hold it in position at the top of the shoulders.

The trickiest part was the cuffs. I’d read online that most people just slip stitch the lining to the inside of the sleeve but my coat lining was machined to the coat at the cuff and I wanted to try to do the same. It took me quite some time to work out how to do it.
I’m not sure I’m going to be able to explain this very well either, but I pulled the coat sleeve and new lining inside out from under the new coat body lining and then attached the sleeve and sleeve lining ‘end to end’ (so it sits like two tubes end to end??) with the right sides together so the hem made a sort of rim around the outside and then stitched around. It really didn’t seem as if it was going to work until I turned it all right way out and it had! Marvellous! If anyone wants me to try to explain that a bit better leave me a comment and I’ll try to do a sketch which might describe it more accurately.

I’ll leave you with a few more pics of the lining in situ (coat turned inside out)
Overall I’m pretty pleased with the result – it certainly looks better than it did and I’ll probably get a few more years out of it now. If I’m going to be picky I did get the lining a tad too short. It doesn’t quite sit as far down as I’d have liked but if I hadn’t told you I’m sure you wouldn’t have noticed!