Bindings for coat sleeves

You know spring is here soon? I know there is still half a meter of snow outside but never the less spring is coming. I can tell by the amount of light we are having, it's not dark when I drive to work or when I return from work, also the birds are singing, a lot, it's so nice.

On spring and fall I use my trench coat that I've bought a few years back. It's a lovely coat and I wear it all the time when the weather allows. I've worn it so much that the sleeves had started to fray from the edge. But otherwise it's in a good shape, so it's in no way going to trash.

I thought I'd add a binding on the edge of the sleeve to cover up the fraying. I had hard time deciding which colour to make the binding from. I had a few options. I could have used the same colour as the trench coat fabric is or then the same colour as the buttons and the belt buckle are on the coat. Also I thought of using some totally different colour. The lining of the coat has some light blue colour and I did think about that for a while, but then figured it would look kind of dumb, because there is no light blue on the right side of the coat. On the end I set on the dark brown of the buttons. The sleeves get dirty easily and in darker colour the stains won't show so clearly.

I went to the fabric store with the coat belt and found fabric very close to the colour of the belt buckle and buttons. Then made two bindings from the fabric and sewed them on.

Once I had sewed on the bindings I didn't really like them, the sleeves looked so different than they looked before so I thought I had made a mistake on the colour. But then I asked A that how he likes my jacket now. And he didn't even realize what had changed in it. So I guess they don't look dumb after all, at least for someone who does not know/remember how it looked like before the bindings do not look conspicious.