The Patriot- Dragoon

Have I mentioned I love Jason Isaacs? No? Well, I do. And William Tavington has an amazing costume. Therefore, I'm cosplaying it. Well, crossplaying it. Since it has a skirt.

For costume reference--

Part 1- The Coat.

I'm not finished with this part yet, considering the coat alone has at least twenty gold buttons on the lapels, not mentioning the sleeves. Or the vest. And gold buttons are apparently very hard to find in our little town. The only place we could find them was Joann's, and they were 2 to a card, for $3. Given that I'll need at least 15 cards.. Yeeeah no. But I finished the rest of it.

I started with a red winter peacoat, found at Saver's for 8 dollars.

Excuse the bad quality.

I also had some green felt. (A lot of green felt..)

First up was the pockets.
This coat had a different type of pockets than the original. In the picture, the green part of the pocket is a horizontal flap over the pocket, whereas with my coat, the pocket is a diagonal slit in the fabric. So instead, I just cut 2 rectangles from the felt and fixed them over the pockets. It still looks okay.

Easy enough.
Next, I sewed a band of green felt around the cuffs of the sleeves. Since there was already a cuff on the coat, I just measured up to the seam, rather than making it a certain length.

I then cut the buttons off the front of the coat, folded the lapels back, and covered them with felt.

The only problem in working with the felt and the coat was that when the already heavy fabric was covered with the felt, it made it very hard to sew, and made it really thick. So in making the collar, I simply cut the already existing collar off of the coat, and made a new one out of just a plain layer of felt, then sewed it on.

After scouring the entire town for gold braid, and not finding any, (because why would they have it?) I discovered that we already had some. I think it's upholstery braid, like the kind used for trimming sofas and things. Could probably be found in Joann's, but I didn't look in that section there, just the ribbon. It looks like this, and is about 3/4 of an inch wide.

I trimmed the pocket flaps, sleeve cuffs, and the collar with the braid.

So as of now, it looks like this. I'm pretty happy with the way it's turning out. With the exceptions of the pockets, it looks pretty close to the original.

Now to find 30+ gold buttons with a design on them... I think it might be easier to find a billion buttons that have the same design but different colours, then spray paint them all gold...

~Michelle