I started with this awesome lime green, teal blue and grey striped wool and went from there. Of course the original striped sweater was pretty cool, but it was sort of a bit much. I find with prints and stripes, a little goes a long way. So I used this crazy vibrant sweater as a "jumping off" point or "foundation sweater", knowing I was going to use it as the flounce down the front of my coat.
After playing with a dozen or so sweaters to try to find a couple that looked good and would work for the various parts of my "foundation sweater", I decided on a gorgeous "gem" green merino sweater that didn't exactly "match" anything in the stripes, but coordinated with it nicely, for the top of the coat. I also found a really nice creamy warm grey merino wool that I thought would work well for the mid-section of the sweater. I also managed to find a nice set of grey buttons, a shade darker than the grey I was using for the mid-section, that helped to "pop" the look.
I decided a bright green thread would do nicely to pull everything together. So I cut and sewed the top and mid-sections (so that it would flare out a bit from the waist to flatter and accommodate a woman's figure). Next, I draped everything on the dressform (the top and mid-section of the sweater, the flounce and the buttons) to see how it looked. For awhile I played with the idea of making this a longer coat, adding some more sections to the bottom, and finishing it with a straight hem made from sections. After staring at all of this for a day and trying various ideas, I decided to keep the coat shorter and go with a larger flounce to finish the bottom. Sometimes I think this is too much flouncing, but here it seemed to really pull everything together, especially on this shorter-length coat.
Once all the decisions were made it was just a matter of making the bottom flounce (also with coordinating inserts) and sewing everything together.
When that was all done, I looked at the coat again for a day before deciding to add a handfull of appliques to the back.
