Sew Far Sew Good: The coat, part 1

I think I may have left it too late to ever become a coat maker. A coat is what us tailor folk call a suit jacket, and coat making is the highest rung on the tailoring ladder. It takes years and years to become a coat maker and I don’t know if I have that long. When I become a competent tailor I will one day make a coat for myself. It will take forever and the sleeves will probably drive me a bit crazy but I’ll definitely make one. Until that day the following sort of stories will have to suffice.

I was in Melbourne for 5 weeks a couple of years ago and I used to go into a shop every time I was in the CBD to look at this jacket. I liked the look of it but they only had it in medium or extra-large. I tried on the extra-large every time and willed it to fit me better but the sleeves were too long and it needed someone with bigger shoulders than me to fill it out properly. Still I kept going in and trying it on over and over. Maybe I could pin the shoulders down or something. My last day there I went in for one last try on. Nothing had changed but I bought it anyway and said I’d worry about it later. When I got home I never wore it, the stupid shoulders looked ridiculous.

Then a couple of months ago I saw the film Drive. I’d never wanted to see a film so much solely based on hearing a couple of songs off the soundtrack. In it Driver has an awesome white jacket that he drives around and beats the shit out of people in. I thought my old Melbourne jacket was kind of in the same cool league as Drivers so got it out of the wardrobe when I was home for Christmas. Lately I’d been seeing the positive effects of shrinking some clothes in the wash and decided to wash the jacket for the first time. Success! It fit me perfectly and smelt a bit nicer.

I wore it to the college open day on Thursday. Open days are different over here. It was on between 2 and 5 so I figured I’d register at 2 and then wander in after to the open day and get shown around or whatever. Registration ended up taking an hour and after I went around to where the open day was it turned out everyone was in a room that was locked from the inside. For the past hour the head of the course was giving a speech and I’d just interrupted it to be let in and totally missed a lot of the important information I needed to get rid of all the doubts I had about this course being real.

I got all the answers I needed from a Paddy Irish man. We were shown the workshops and he was in there working on his first year project. He was wearing a paddy cap and there were a few others in his class wearing hats. I don’t know if I can take someone who wears a hat seriously but he told me everything I needed to know about the course. The workshop was like art class again, everyone was standing around working on something, listening to music, all the different years mixed in together. I liked it. I also liked everything he told me about the course, and I had my student card, what could go wrong? Surely I was ready to start telling people I was going back to college to be a tailor? Maybe even just my family? Nah, I still couldn’t really be sure until I was standing in class in a month’s time hearing my name called out.

Straight after the open day I went out to Shepherds bush to meet some Australian mates and a friend I used to work with in Oz. It was 6pm on Australia day and already people were beyond messy. I waited for the compliments to start flowing in on my nicely fitting jacket but they never came so I gave it to my old work mate to hang over her handbag. Around midnight after a fair few drinks she did something out of character and decided to start a cat fight with an unsuspecting girl passing by. Hair was pulled, faces were scratched and drinks were thrown. At least two drinks were thrown but she must have got in loads more fights cause when I stumbled out of bed the next afternoon my jacket was filthy so I threw it straight in the wash again.

Just as the wash was finishing I remembered something. The pen! I got a pen at the open day and had it in my top pocket. Ah feck! But it might be ok, I had a pen in the wash a few weeks ago and it didn’t leak at all, it just took on a funny shape.