I am a lucky lady

I was browsing sewing blogs yesterday when I came across this fabulous sewing notions rail on the Coletterie blog. If you haven't seen it, click on over and take a gander- what a neat way to organize your rulers and sewing shears and other notions!

I clicked the "email this post" link in google reader and shot it off to the sailor with a note "some day this summer will you help me hang up a rail like this for my rulers?" and put it out of my mind. Well. Apparently the sailor was on his ship still when he got the mail, and showed it to some of his crew. They told him that he was just a newly wed so perhaps he didn't recognize that this could be see as operational orders for him to follow.

So.... this was all unbeknownst to me until I came home, very tired, from work today and stepped into the office. Oh my. Have a look at what was waiting for me:

Hooray! Isn't that the sweetest surprise? It certainly made my week! I spent a while puttering around and hanging up more quilting rulers and french curves on it and moving seam rippers around in the cups. Very cool! And I can second Sarai's recommendation, this pot rail makes quite the wonderful sewing notions organizer. :o)

I have done a bit of sewing recently, I just don't have great pictures yet. Perhaps I should hang my camera up on one of these hooks...

A raincoat

This is me, about to head out on an exciting trip to Target with the sailor. In my finished Minoru Jacket!

Yes, at long last I've wrestled the heavy canvas into a suprisingly water resistant jacket. Not super water proof, because it's only cotton and I didn't tape the seams, but it works well enough to run to the train in a rain shower. The canvas is from BJs and it's been lightly treated to be water resistant - water will bead up on it and run off pretty easily.
I apologize for the crazy photos... my sailor does many things well (ship handling, dealing with my mother, making me laugh, making tasty scrambled eggs) but taking fabulous fashion photographs of finished garments is maybe a smidge outside his skill set. ;)

I did not shorten the arms here, having had a disaster in the past with too-short arms on a coat. I wanted to wait and see what they would really look like. So... next time, I will fold about an inch and a half out of the upper arm, where you can see it bunching up on me.
You can see here how "poufy" the collar is with a thick canvas hood stuffed inside.

I did a little tweak to the inner pockets and made one a zip pocket... modeled on one of my favorite parkas. The inside zip is great for holding a metrocard and some cash and is easy to access.

I lined it in cotton solely because this print reminds me of clouds and I loved the idea of a cloudy lining to a rain coat.

I will definitely be making another one, probably with a lighter material. Several years ago I bought some thin silvery blue poly rain coat material in Paron's Annex, so I might use that, underlined with something a bit beefier like flannel. I think this coat really needs a material with a little bit of body. In addition, next time I will shorten the sleeves and add some inseam pockets.
The part that I was most freaked out about, sewing the elastic waist, turned out to be the easiest. It was a little tricky to thread the elastic through with just a safety pin attached to pull on. But the casing came out straight - the lines I marked with a chalk pencil did not, as I'd feared, entirely rub off during construction. Yay!
The sewing was a pretty long process, and I did goof up a lot in other spots. If you look you'll see that one of the plackets is not straight and nicely squared off at the bottom (ooops), and the top stiching was a little wonky in places. However, overall the coat came out pretty nicely.