Handcraft Coat Making Class

Author: Tracy Gragg

Coat making is by far the most satisfying art in handcraft tailoring. It requires the most skills and combination of techniques to create a satisfactory outcome.

No one is born with a gift that makes coat making easy from the beginning. We all struggle and fail time and again before turning out a garment we are proud to put our name on, holding it up to the world as an example of a finely tailored handcraft coat.

When Rory launched his free video series The Making of a Coat on YouTube back in 2012, he was inundated with requests for apprenticeships. It was clear to him that there were many novices out there in the same position he had found himself over ten years before. Something had to be done and something only a dedicated bespoke tailoring school would do. A coat making class needed to be made readily available to anyone who wished to learn coat making.

Handmade should never be used as an excuse, but rather as a mark of hard work and quality in every stitch. Coat making brings together many disciplines such as basting with fullness, pocket making, hand padding, layered stitching, fell stitching and of course, the mark of a truly handcrafted suit, the handmade buttonhole.

Every student of tailoring that ever longed to make a handcraft coat. Too often we just go head first into coat making without honing the important hand skills and machine skills required.

At The HTA, we understand the thirst for knowledge that all aspiring tailors have. When a tailoring apprenticeship cannot be secured, one trawls the internet and other various materials seeking the skills they so desperately want to know. There is a sea of outdated, incoherent and often outright misleading information that exists around bespoke tailoring. It is truly astounding.

So many of the non-sewing, self-taught bespoke tailors had muddied the waters with made to measure. Someone had to show the world that handcraft was not dead, only dormant. Coat making is such a specialised field that only an online coat making class could bring it back to life. Realising that in-house courses were too limited and only a few could afford the time and expense, Rory decided that only comprehensive online tailoring classes would help fill the void. After a few false starts working with outside film-makers, Rory and his partner decided it was something they would have to do themselves.

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