Dear sewing community!

It went through a 'distasteful' phase, but now is coming into a much better shape!! TONS of work hy hand - I spent almost the whole day on it today, and it's about ready for wearing!

The extremely-steep learning curve was mostly in the bottom front, where the border meets the centre.. it just was all lumpy and too out-of-proportion in the waist.... So I thought for several days about a kind of waistband - then decided a nice red waist reinforcement, made out of three jumper (sweater) waist borders:

This was a lot of handsewing, once I'd machined the red strips together - I sewed it into the middle of the coat so that it will hug my waist cosily, and I think that it may still need a small tuck to neaten it.

And once that was in place, it still looked mis-dimensioned, so I felt into it some more, tried some different colour combinations.... then figured out that repeating the turquoise-ish wool below the red waistband, would be fabulous...

I only had enough of the turquoise for the front, and this ended up even better, as I used another cooler shade for the back: I love how the orange-y border was improved by the blues being added as another layer in front of it! The improvised fitting of the blues sat really well into the form and into the colour palette!

Finally (for today) I started trying to get the bottom-front-middle to sit better... I did a lot of pinning and fiddling, but couldn't get it to sit better - wah!! - so took the leap! I cut out the insides which were too lumpy, and pulled out the bottom of the zip.... then got out some nice scraps which looked good as a new edging...