The Tale of Rose Red, Part 6

Clearly, the most important thing you need if you're going to be Little (or Tall) Red Riding Hood is a red cape and hood.

I splurged. I meant to try and be economical and find something sufficient, but it was not to be. I found this red wool suiting (it was on sale, but I still don't want to admit what I paid for it), and it was so perfect-- the color, the drape, the heft. I could not resist.  I bought the blasted red wool for real.

That part was expensive, but easy.

The cloak construction itself was easy enough too. I used McCall's M6420 because I already had it and I figured a cloak is a cloak. Eh... I don't know who this cloak was designed for. Maybe Darth Vader wearing linebacker shoulderpads. I ended up reducing the curvature of the shoulders severely on this pattern. I also narrowed the panels and it doesn't quite close, but it's supposed to hang nicely open, so that was just my call.

The next adventure was the side slits for her arms to go through. At first I thought they'd be easy enough to add to the middle sides of the cloak, until I looked more closely at the pictures and realized the slits were on the inside of the trim, closer to the body. This required some creative finagling but I made it work. 

The next problem became what to do about the mystery trim on her cloak. Can you tell what it's made of? Because I certainly cannot.

This is the best picture I could come up with on short notice, but I have consulted quite a few, and best I can tell it's unspun wool that's been tacked down onto the cloak. And some embroidery. And the cloak itself has been distressed in between so the whole thing is very fuzzy.


After roaming around JoAnn's and considering several options, I finally bought three skeins of super fuzzy yarn in dark purple, lavender, and white. Someday I will stop needing to buy things in lavender.

Then I scrounged through the sewing supplies I inherited from my mother and found a lovely, blunt tapestry needle with a big huge eye.

I used the needle to make willy-nilly patterns along the border like so.... (the white trim was very minimal)

A look at the full cloak after the first night of yarn experiments.

I put all the trim on first before sewing back the edge of the border so it's a nice, tidy finish with no understitching showing through.

And those are all my notes on cloak construction! Onward to the main event!