My husband Dave wanted to go as Blackbeard from ‘On Stranger Tides’. I used Simplicity 7923 for the coat, shirt, and vest. I lengthened the vest to knee-length and added 9″ to the coat length to be more like the original. We opted not to use leather (as in the original) for the coat & vest (not on our budget!), but went with canvas for the coat and cotton jacquard for the vest. I couldn’t find black cotton lace that I liked for the shirt cuffs, so I bought ‘natural’ cotton lace and dyed it. The “boots” were from Simplicity 0806. There were 22 triple-pointed appliques on the coat, and 28 ornamental buttons!  It took a lot longer to make than I expected–the appliques alone took over two and a half hours just to stitch down–but he looked quite grand when it was all done.

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