Rural Gardening: I made a chicken coat because of a rescue., 1 by DrDoolotz

DrDoolotz wrote:
Hi Toltin,

I have attached a picture of the coat (ready to be washed so sorry it's dirty!) and shown the measurements. It was pretty easy.

1. Cut out the shape to roughly the dimensions I show, maybe adding a half inch at each end if you are going to hem it. I only hemmed top and bottom, not sides.
2. Use fleece if you don't want to hem it because it doesn't unravel from the edges.
3. I hemmed along the "collar" part to give it more form. I just rolled over the edge of the fleece and stitched it down. Then I hemmed the bottom edge.
4. At this point, I tried it on the hen. I kind of felt where her shoulders/wings started and made little marks on the fleece so I knew where to cut the wing holes.
5. I did zig-zag stitch around the wing hole cut outs just for support. To cut out the wing holes, I folded the fabric in half from the point that I had marked, and used the scissors to just cut out a small portion along the fold line, so that it was wider than just a slit, but not too big so that their wings come right out. Fleece is nice and stretchy.
6. I used velcro for the attachment at the neck. I sewed that on and I sewed on a longer piece of the "fluffy" side and a small piece of the "scratchy" side so that it is adjustable.

You can see in the picture that the fluffy side is the long black piece in the upper left, and the small "scratchy" bit is on the opposite side of the fabric so you can only see the little rectangle of stitching right at the right hand end of the collar part.

Let me know if you have any questions. It really isn't hard to do! The hen will initially act a bit freaked out by it and possibly walk backwards for a while. This is sort of funny to watch. Within about 10 minutes, mine seemed to have adapted to their coats.

Claire