Velveteen Coat - Vogue Pattern #Unknown

I started making this coat back in March/April of 2006.  The fabric is a heavy weight velveteen, lined with crepe back satin.  I bought the fabric from Fashion Fabric Club Online.  It is so gray here that I had to use the flash to get the picture.  The pattern is a Clair Shaeffer Vogue Couture pattern, but I can no longer find it, so I have no idea what the pattern number is, and a quick search on the internet yielded no results, so I am guessing that it is out of print.  It certainly is not to be found on the Vogue web site.  So, for the past 6 years it has been living on one of my dress maker dummies (yes, I have more than one) waiting for a suitable method of closure.

I originally bought a number of beautiful glass lamp work buttons at Bead & Button, but one of the shanks broke and I was nervous about using them only to have them break.  Recently I thought about using some Czech pressed glass buttons, but the sticking point was always the button holes.  The fabric is heavy enough that machine sewn button holes just weren't going to work, believe me, I tried.  Next I thought about binding the button holes with silk ribbon and I spent an afternoon trying to make that work, to no avail.  I also tried binding the button holes with hand stitching, but I couldn't get that to look the way I wanted it to.  Finally I hit on the idea of frogs.  So, off to the internet I went and googled and I found Angel Trim.

They are located in Hong Kong and have an amazing supply of fashion accessories.  I selected half a dozen different frog designs and submitted my order only to have it fail after I had completed the payment process via PayPal.  You can well imagine my alarm, my money had been sent, but not my order.  Fortunately I still had the page with my cart on it open, so I hit the "contact us" button and copied and pasted my order into the message, that was on January 29.  On January 31 I received an email thanking me for my message and saying that my order would go out that day, airmail.  On February 9 I received another email from them telling me that they had been sent registered mail, with a tracking number, and asking me to let them know when they arrived. That same day I had a notice in my mailbox that I had a registered mail parcel.  I just picked them up from the post office today.  With their selection and service I will definitely be shopping there again, and shipping was surprisingly inexpensive - only $11.

Now I just have to make something equally spectacular to wear with the coat.