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The American Duchess Cape Cult: Modern Monday

As a creative person, I do live in the modern world, and maintaining blogs for multiple time frames is exhausting at best. Going forward the first Monday of the month  will be "Modern Monday" and I will post about a project from after the 16th century. 




Our first project is my American Duchess Patreon Cape ca 1910. To help fight the covid 19 boredom the awesome folks at American Duchess made the cape pattern free on their Patreon page (link at bottom). Their Patreon members have access to other awesome patterns so it is worth checking out. I fell in love with this pattern and decided I was going to whip our up to fight the patriarchy  as the pattern is contemporary to the United States Suffragette movement. 


I made a mock up after scaling out the pattern to realize while it is a very adjustable pattern, it was scaled for a 38 inch bust and I am a 45 inch. The pattern thankfully is fairly simple to adjust for a larger bust.This is a great example of why we should always make a mock up. 


Below are some of my notes if you too have a larger bust & want to hack the pattern:



-I added 1 inch along all pattern piece edges to give me some ease for the velvet I decided to make my cape in, and it gave me 1/2 inch seam allowances. Remember that the original pattern is drafted without seam allowance!



- The front wrap pieces needed to be lengthened to accommodate my 45 inch bust . I added 8 inches to each front panel giving me an overlap in the back to secure the panels with a button and button hole behind my back. 

-As I lengthened the strap, I also adjusted the point of the darts 3 inches lower so they would stop around my bust point, not in my armpits.

-Another adjustment I would make on my front panels would be to widen them by 2 inches. I decided this after wearing my completed cape around for a few days since it wasn't as noticeable in the mock up fabric. As is, the straps did not fully reach under the bust as it does on several of the models and other makers who have played with the pattern. 

-Because I think collars should be dramatic, I wanted mine to flair out a bit more. I achieved this by pad stitching some wool felt into the underside of the collar to help keep the dramatic curve. 




- My cape is made from 2 cotton velvet curtains I found in the "as is" section of Ikea which I decided to up-cycle. If you are working with velvet, make sure you baste your seams rather than trusting pins. All of these curved construction seams like to crawl when working with velvet. 


I underestimated the time this cape would take. At first I thought it would be done in a day, maybe 2. The cape actually took double that to do all of the hand finishing and detail work I wanted to. 2 days to work on the pattern and mock ups, 2 days to do some machine sewing and hand finishing. Hopefully this will help speed up your own sewing adventures and to resize the pattern for a larger but with minimal headache.




American Duchess Patreon


Edits: Took down to fix some formatting issues and typos. Republished 1 hour later.



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