The awkward time period from Winter to Spring when you don’t know what the weather will be like calls for the perfect ‘inbetween-ie’ coat. Step forward the sleeveless trench. We love its ability to layer (may we suggest a polo neck underneath?) And the fact it’s not as bulky as a ‘full’ coat, the perfect throw on and go piece.
If you have an old trench in need of a re-vamp, remember we showed you how you can remove the sleeves yourself with an easy DIY, here.
When Coach unveiled its SS 16 Collection at New York Fashion Week, we fell hard for the sceneic desert and moon filled landscapes, especially when we saw the motif on the back of one of their iconic trenches.
When we saw blogger Osiris Martínez rock the trenchon Instagram, our minds were made up….we would dream up a DIY to make an inspired version.
We love this pastel coloured trench by designer Tome and decided the blue hues of a mountain landscape would be the perfect extra detail for the back.
You’ll need
A sleeveless trench, our blue number was from Boohoo that has since sold out, but you can find a similar style at Missguided
Faux Leather fabric in a variety of colours (this gives a great effect, is easy to cut and doesn’t fray):
One 15cm x 15cm sample of grey, silver (optional), and green faux leather fabric.
Two 15 x 15 sample squares of white and navy faux leather fabric.
Measure the back area of your trench, we only needed a 18 inch wide by 4 inch rectangle of blackfaux leather, not half a metre as most suppliers offer. Message the eBay seller and I’m sure they’ll be happy to send you a cut of a required size. If not local fabric shop will usually do any size cuts, give them a ring.
Plain A4 Paper and a pen** **
How to
Before you start, decide which scene you’d like to add to the back of your trench. Google some inspiration images, we searched ‘simple mountain scene drawing’. Do some googling even if you don’t fancy a mountain scene, may we suggest a green country hillside, the seaside or a tropical island?
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Once you’ve measured the back section of your trench (work out how much of the back you’d like the scene to cover, ours had a separately hemmed section to the back, so we used those measurements) lay out your faux leather and gather all materials.
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We chose to print a few of our inspirational images, to help us when drawing our templates. You could however just look at them on a phone or laptop for a guide.
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Laying out your images, start drawing out some shapes that will be the template for your mountains. We drew three triangular shapes, descending in size. We layed the paper against the back of our trench, and were happy with the size, as they covered about three quarters of the area across the middle section of our coat.
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We cut these out, and laying the paper on top of the navy leather, cut the shapes out with fabric scissors.
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Next, we decided to add a section of trees to our mountain scene, as seen in some of our inspiration pictures. We layed a rectangluar strip of green leather to the left hand side of our mountain templates. Without being too precise, we cut top and sides of the green strip with fabric scissors, cutting random jaggered edges to give the illusion of a tree line.
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Next, to give the mountains a 3D effect and add some texture, we went about drawing 20 small jaggered shapes, that could be added to the top of our mountain shapes. If you aren’t happy to draw these freehand, you could trace the shape of some on your printed images.
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We cut the templates for these out and placing 10 each on our grey and white fabric, traced these and cut them out.
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We played around placing them on top of our mountain shapes, until we were happy with the position. Once we were, we used a small amount of our fabric glue to secure these in place.
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We drew paper templates for two cloud shapes, and cut them out of our white fabric, you could include as many or as few as you want in your scene, you could also add a sun or moon if you’d like.
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Next we cut one small piece of green leather fabric to make another small line of trees for the other side of our mountain.
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We liked that the trenches blue colour meant the mountains seperated what would be the sky and a lake below, but we wanted to create a strip of fabric to represent the ground below our mountain scene. Stretching across the whole of the back of our trench, we used our 18 inch long piece of black leather, and cutting it 1 inch high, with a varying waved edge, placed this below the mountains, and over the top of our tree line, to give a neat finish.
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We used the excess black fabric to make three birds that would sit next to the clouds in our scene, to do this we cut out 3 small shaped pieces in a curved ‘V’.
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At this stage, we were happy with our scene and ready to glue everything in place, however if you did want to make the ‘lake’ below the moutains more of a feature, you could use some small silver wave length pieces to create the illusion of water.
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Once you are happy with all your cut out pieces, play around with the position of your scene, and when you are sure, glue everything in place. You only need a tiny bit of this strong glue, pressing down firmly to secure.
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When it comes to the edges, if you have any excess leather, cut these in line with the trench’s hem, to finish.
You think somethings gunna stop us wearing this trench at the weekend? Ain’t no mountain high enough…
Like this? Then you might also be interested in:
The Best 'Ladylike' Clothes In Primark For When You're Definitely Not 'Ladylike'
The Crochet Blanket Coat Is Back And I Have Mixed Feelings About It
Follow Jenny on Twitter @jennybrownlees
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.