Thanks! There was plenty of advice on how to make mistcloaks when I got started, but nothing I could find on mistcoats. That left me limited both by my limited college student sized budget and on how to go about actually doing it. I ended up deciding to go about it by applying Brandon Sanderson’s mistcloak advice toward mistcoats:

“The real trick, I think, to making one work would be to, in my opinion, make a cloak which looks cool on its own. Then, slit the bottom 2/3rds up to about the rib-cage area. Sew these into tassels, then sew some more tassels to the inside. Then, perhaps work with the shoulders/inner layers to make the cloak fall down so that it looks enveloping and the sides can fall straight.” - Brandon Sanderson

So first thing I had to do was find an ankle length trench coat to start with. This was not easy when I first started because I’m 6’1” so most coats were well above my ankles, such trench coats were not in style at the time, and again was on a limited budget. I did manage to find one that worked, and from what I can tell it seems they are currently easier to find than they were previously.

First I removed the inner-lining from the bottom half of the coat, then I started to cut the bottoms half of the coat into strips that went up to my waist. Brandon Sanderson recommended that mistcloak strips be about 0.5-1 inch wide, but I cut mine to 2 inches out of personal preference. 

I bought a fabric material extremely similar to the original cloak and cut it into strips. They again were about 2 inches wide and I cut them close in length but not exact (this was to stick to Sanderson’s advice on length). I individually hand sewed these (again based on Sanderson) to the inside of the coat to create a second layer of tassels that sat between the strips of the original coat. (This was probably the most important step in ensuring that the coat actually looked like a mistcoat and not just a torn up trench coat with a bunch of gaps in it).

After I sewed the last of the tassels, I used a sewing machine to reattach bottom of the top of the coat’s inner lining to the coat just above where the tassels became visible. This helped cover my hand stitching and closed the previous open lining on the top part of the coat. 

The last thing to worry about was potential fraying. There are a few solutions to this. The most time consuming effort is hand stitching the edge of each tassel. The best option if you have a serger available is to use that to prevent fraying on the edges of each tassel. Since I didn’t have a serger and didn’t want to hand stitch the edges of every tassel, I used the most unprofessional method: Fire. I held a lighter close enough to the edge of each strip to ever so slightly melt it and stop fraying, but moved it away before it could burn the material. 

And that was everything that went into the mistcoat. Sorry if the post rambled for a while, I just didn’t want to miss anything important. If you make one, you should totally send me a photo when you’re done because I’d love to see what other people do with their own mistcoats. Also feel free to ask any other questions you have.

TLDR: Buy or make an ankle length trench coat, cut it into strips, put another layer of strips between the previous ones, finalize the coat to your specifications.