All change!

I make no bones about it – I am a self-proclaimed perfectionist.
If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing right!

Now, I am also a realist.
That means that sometimes, just sometimes, you have to compromise and use an alternative if the goal you are aiming for is truly unobtainable, or just not justifiable on a budget. But it has to be a good alternative.

But occasionally, even finding the perfect materials can be double-edged sword, especially when it does not live up to expectation.

The Alcantara is a case in point.
Ever since the costume design display at the Earl’s Court exhibition last year, a hand-written note (see right) caused a frenzy of forum activity, and the hunt was on to find out what it meant, and ultimately track down the fabric the coat was made from.

I hunted high and low, and despite the main Alcantara range being easy to find, it lacked the colour needed, and just lacked the texture and feel of the coat I had seen at Earl’s Court.

Ultimately I did find a range from Alcantara that is a good match and I got a swatch to take along to compare to the coat on display (see left).

Under the rules of if it seems easy, it’s not, the fabric soon proved to be from a discontinued range, with no supplies in the UK, so I had to import it across Europe at enormous expense, bringing the cost to over £75 a metre. Ouch!

Journey’s (Land’s) End

The second part of my recent holiday took in Cornwall and the Penwith peninsula. The farmhouse where we were stay was only a few miles from Land’s End, where there is a permanent Doctor Who Exhibition.

I had seen a lot of pictures on the net from the recent Earl’s Court Exhibition, but none from Land’s End. So I set about putting that right.

The outside of the Exhibition is decked out like a massive TARDIS, and you enter through the lower part of the front door. It’s £4 to get in, which isn’t too bad, considering Earl’s Court was £9.

When you first go in, after passing a ticket collector, you walk up a low-rise, wide, curved staircase, along one wall of which is a display of photographs of the first nine Doctors.

At the top of the stairs is a panel introducing “New Companions”, but strangely not the tenth Doctor. I thought that a little odd.

The first costume displays you come to are an Angel (below left) from Voyage Of The Damned, and a boiler suit for a Lumic Work Technician (below right) from Rise Of The Cybermen/Age Of Steel. The latter not being the most exciting of costumes to begin the exhibition with.

Sontaran G3 Military Assessment Survey

I haven’t been posting on here much for the past couple of weeks as I have been on holiday down in Devon and Cornwall. Yipeee!

We had a great time and it was a good excuse for me to take in a couple of Who activities, one in either county, that I would not normally get the chance to visit.

Before setting out, I had taken a look on doctorwholocations.net and put in the postcode of where we were staying in Devon, and found that Hound Tor was relatively not that far away.

Hound Tor had been the main location for the classic Tom Baker episode, The Sontaran Experiment. I remember seeing it when it was first screened, and always liked it for its short story approach to a Who tale. Little two-parters don’t come along often, and it was the first I had seen in my Who watching experience, besides, anything to see the original Sontaran actor, Kevin Lindsey giving the seminal performance is always worth a watch.

I had always pictured the location used as a distant, remote spot, high in the Dartmoor hills, and not easily accessed. Though it is true the approach is through winding narrow roads, if I had thought about it, the BBC would not have picked it for an outside broadcast, video-shot episode, if they could not get their equipment within easy reach. A look on GoogleMaps shows the Tor and how close it is to the nearest road, as well as a car park close by (see below © google).

First full shots of new coat

At last! At last! The coat is finished and here it is!!!

Can’t blame me for having a little fun in my first time in front of a camera with it, eh?

I took these in a local underpass, which I think gives it a suitable grungy feel. Better than just in the back garden like on previous coats!

First a little sonic action, though again, I can’t find my new series sonic! It must be here somewhere - just don’t know where!

Click to enlarge

The a bit of action photography!

Home straight

Last thing to finish the main work on the coat is hemming the bottom.

After deciding how long I want the coat, it being a compromise between being too long and tripping over it all the time (as I did with my Mk I - hell that was too long!) and ending up too short, I pin the hemline I want to have.

I then press it along the hem to define the edge I will work to.

While I was researching The Competition’s Efforts, I noticed a couple of pictures showed people wearing their Tennant coats held open, to show the internal pockets. 

When they did this, the lining was hanging like a big bag and sagging badly in the middle (see left). I wanted to try and prevent this, so I sewed the lining’s vertical seam allowance to the seam allowance down the insides of the coat to support and secure it. I did this from around 6 inches below the armpit to 18 inches from the hem. This is a bit unconventional - I’m sure you aren’t supposed to do this, but it has also stabilized the position of the lining around the hem area, which I then found much easy to work with.

The hem is then laid out flat and I cut the lining level with the seam allowance of the coat hem (see right). At this point I need to check the circumference of the the lining and the coat match. If there is any extra, I just slightly take the vertical lining seam in a bit.

Getting the collar right - at last!

This is the one bit of the coat I think I am the most stressed about putting together!!!

Since the collar and lapels seam with pretty much the entire coat, any slip up could be far reaching, meaning I might have to re-cut right back to almost the beginning. If I had ruined a pocket, I would only have to remake that isolated part, not the whole coat.

That said, the first thing to do is set the under collar into the body of the coat. This will check that I have the collar the right length. Sometimes I need to adjust the pattern slightly to make sure it fits, so I have left cutting the collar until now, rather than when I cut the rest of the coat earlier in the week.

There is a tricky dog-leg seam to sew in each side which ends up below the collar, so I set these and ease the rest of the collar in across the back of the neck. This give me the first chance to really see how the coat is looking (see right). Looking good.

The pattern is cut a little generous around the collar, to give me some cloth to play with in case of crisis. I therefore adjust and mark the final collar size before stitching.

Setting the sleeves

One of the things I did earlier in the week when I had a blitz on cutting the fabric, was to quickly make a start the sleeves. I only sewed them together to get a head start, and now I am setting them in the coat body which has been assembled ready, I’ll recap all I did with the sleeves.

Sleeves are always one of those easy things to assemble, but if I haven’t done them in advance, can slow down assembling the coat.

I first cut the sleeves (see above left) in Alcantara. Notice the marks for sleeve apex and three parallel lines for the sleeve head formation. I also cut the lining using pinking sheers, which proved to be a sucessful exercise on the test coat (see above right).

Firstly I stitch the longer back seam and press it flat, but with all of the seam allowance folded towards the front of the sleeve. I then topstitch the seam, within 1 to 1.5mm away from the edge. The sleeve is then closed off by sewing the front seam, which is just conventionally pressed flat.

I am using the slightly adjusted pattern I did for the calico coat, which is designed to give a more roomy fit at the back, while still being quite tailored at the front.

These two photographs show what I mean: (left) you can see the sleeve is set in cleanly and is well fitted (right) you can see a series of puckers at the seam, which is giving it a fuller fit. To mimic this I need to adjust the level of gathering in the sleeve head so it is smooth at the front and across the apex of the sleeve, but allowing it to pucker slightly as it falls down the back of the sleeve.

Sum of its parts

Well, I have now finished ‘decorating’ (as I like to call it) all the main sections of the coat, and am ready to start bringing them together at last.

Before I do, here they are, and a little reminder of some of the details and features each has.

BACK

Capacity vent in centre of back; two top-stitched tailoring darts on each side of vent; four-buttoned slit with receiving buttonholes in enclosing pockets; lining integrally sewn at initial stage.

FRONTS

Welted pocket with separate pocket flap surface-sewn 1 inch above pocket; tailoring dart down centre; two underarm tailoring darts ending at pocket flap; four 28mm horn buttons along dart.

LAPELS

Orange Dupion flashed internal welted pockets.

SLEEVES

Over-stitched back seam; single stitched underarm seam.

Panic over a seam I did not know about!

Next thing to tackle, which took most of a day last weekend, were the fronts. Initially I thought this was going to be nice and easy, but then I had to go and make it difficult for myself!

I had long studied the coat, and thought I was familiar with every single seam and tailoring dart it contained. While I was writing a previous blog entry about the sleeves, I posted a cropped vserion of a picture to show the detail of top-stitching on the back darts (see above).

What I spotted in the picture - slightly to my horror - was that there are two tailoring darts in the front half of the coat, under the arms running down to the tops of the pocket flaps. 

I have tried to make it a bit clearer here (see above) by labeling the darts and seams.

I had long known that there was at least one there, but had only included it in my pattern when I got to the calico test coat, which I was just finishing at the time (I had noticed it not long after finishing the Mk III.)

I realized that in all the pictures I had seen to date, David’s arm had covered the back dart when seen from the front; and covered the font dart when seen from the back; I had never seen a picture showing BOTH darts together, until now.

Inside pockets - smoke and mirrors

My next sewing session on the Alcantara coat was a mid-week evening, so I kept it to relatively simple stuff rather than anything too involved. That I save for the weekends!

The work I had done on the calico coat was now paying dividends, as I could confidently storm ahead and start cutting the final cloth without the usual stages of cutting and adjusting as I went along. This time I would know they would all fit together right, pretty much first time.

In one evening I cut essentially the rest of the whole coat, bar the collar, which I felt needed special attention. I won’t show you all this now, but will reveal the cutting of the coat as I tackle the assembly of each relative section.

The first manageable part I decided to assemble were the lapel fronts, which although they are cut, don’t get sewn in until much later, but the inside pockets can be set now. It is so much easier doing it while the lapels are loose pieces of fabric: it is like sewing a demonstration or test.

The pattern is marked with the roll of the lapel and pocket positions, though the Sonic pocket is now canceled (see right).

I then transfer the pocket position from the pattern (see left) and mark it in tailor’s chalk; and attach the lower welt, which is made of interfaced orange Dipon fabric (see below - top left). The welt is pinned upside-down, rightside facing down. The back of the pocket is attached in the same way and the width of the pocket is sewn between the vertical chalk marks. I then carefully slit the gap between the two lines of stitching (see below - top right).

Work begins

CHAPTER TWO

At last, the moment I have been building towards for so long . . . I am starting to make my coat from Alcantara!!

Goes without saying I starting with the back, made even easier by the adjustments I have fed back from making the test coat. I am more confident about assembling it now, being still fresh from working in calico.

Pieces in a jigsaw

Now that I had refined and tested my pattern to a stage where I was happy with it, I can now cut the entire coat almost in one go, rather than be designing and cutting in tandem.

Because of this, I realised how few pieces I actually needed to cut to make the coat!

The complete list is as follows:

ALCANTARA

Back - 2

Fronts - 2

Lapels - 2

Collar - 2

Sleeves - 4

Outer pockets (welts & flaps) - 8

TOTAL - 20

(above - the freshly cut lapels)

LINING

Back - 2

Fronts - 2

Sleeves - 4

TOTAL - 8

ORANGE DUPION

Inside pocket welts - 2

TOTAL - 2

(above - the outer pockets, Alcantara parts)

BROWN MOLESKIN

Inside pocket backs - 2

TOTAL - 2

POCKET LININGS

Inside pockets - 2

Outer pockets - 2

TOTAL - 4

(above - cutting the upper sleeve)

GRAND TOTAL - 36

What’s in a colour?

Apologies in advance if this entry may be a little dry and dull - but I thought it worth talking about the colour of the coat before embarking on making the Alcantara version.

FACT: colour is a very subjective thing.

Someone may see something as red, someone else may see it more as a purple, others a magenta.

The 10th Doctor’s coat is equally puzzling as it seems to change colour from image to image.

Shown here are close-up details from fifteen images of the coat.

They ALL look different colours; some are beige; some are walnut; a couple are dark brown; some are even bordering on an olive colour - but they are all allegedly the same coat, therefore have to be the same colour.

Now to be fair, some of these images are heavily retouched and altered to create a mood image for the relevant episodes, so some colours here are probably red-herrings.

So, with all this choice available, who can point to a single image and say - THAT is the colour the coat should be?

From a couple of close-up portraits of The Doctor, I could see the coat had been made from a faux suede material, so I set about finding as many as I could.

ALCANTARA - where do we go from here?

Well, after all that search we now had a name:

ALCANTARA

Louise Page, the costume designer for the series had long maintained that the material used for the coat had been discontinued, so it was impossible to find now.

Not letting a minor thing that that put me off, I set about tracking it down.

And what did that 'ROAN 11' mean?

Obvious internet searches brought up a variety of sources for the material, but nothing obviously the right one.

My next point of call was the various Doctor Who forums to see what they had to say, as the news of this display at Earl's Court had hit big with everyone. There was a lot of discussion and debate about it, with various people recounting the leads they had found and the dead ends they had reached.

Then I found, hidden away on an obscure distributor's site an apparently forgotten range of Alcantara material. Could this be the one? It had a flecking to the colour - that seemed to match. Maybe it was the one. Could I have found it?

I asked for a sample of the colour I thought best matched it, in fact I asked for the entire swatch card for the whole range. But alas, being part of a discontinued range, no-one had any swatches left, let alone any actual material.

One of the contacts I tracked down was more than willing to help. He was a UK distributor for Alcantara and told me that if I order at least 200 metres, it would be feasible to re-weave the colour I wanted from the discontinued range. Anything less it would not be worth their while.

That was great news. I had seen some instances of 'group-buying' on the costuming forums, so thought this would be an ideal way of making it available again - not only for myself, but for anyone else who was up for having a good go at making their own coat. I also thought that if I could interest some of the replica costume makers, such as Magnoli, Baron's Boutique and maybe Cloth Ears, they could be alloted a large part of the run, leaving enough for the individuals to get what they needed too.

So, I put it to the forum on www.doctorwhoforums.com to see what they thought.

Here is what I posted (you will need to be logged in to view it).

Group buying forum posting

Well, I wasn't quite prepared for the reaction I would get. Within a few hours of my inital posting.

The Earl's Court Exhibition - all bets are off!

So - The Doctor is in town!

Had to go and say hello - didn't I?

As I said before, instead of the coat being in a spinning glass case, it was this time on open display. You could go up to it and touch it - take the closest look.

Here are some of my pictures from that day.

And before you ask - no, I have no shame.

It was real cool to be so close to the coat.

The fabric it is made from is real soft to the touch, almost like velvet. It is clearly a suede like material, but a real good quality one. The colour is complex, being made of a flecked fabric, with lighter longer fibres over a darker, shorter base.

Moving round to the back of the coat, I finally totally understood what that back slit and pleats was all about.

The pleats of the gusset carry on down to the hemline, with the right hand side extended to lap under the left.

The left then has a flap sewn at intervals along its height, equally spaced along with are four button holes. There are then buttons on the right to correspond with the holes. Only the top most button is done up (at all times).

Then, in the next room of the exhibition there was a display of the costume designs for the series. One of these is for The Doctor, and it contained a bombshell!!!!

A hand written caption on the display states:

COAT:

BROWN ALCANTARA

'sofa' fabRiC

ROAN 11

single Breasted 

with BACK 

VENT & BUTTON 

DETAiL

INSiDE POCKET

DETAiL.

Could this finally be THE lead that brings us to THE fabric used for the coat????