Hello

In the past months I’ve done quite a bit of knitting, but hardly any sewing. As you may remember we sold our house and moved. A month ago we moved to a house we rent for a while, as we have not yet succeeded in buying the house we want.

It was a bit of an unsettling time, sorting out our belongings, what to take  to the temporary home, what to put into storage. At the end of the day one box with sewing stuff ended up in storage by accident. Fabrics I planned to sew this spring were in that box as well as most of my thread. Lucky enough not my collection of interfacing, that would have been worse.

Of course this was an excuse to buy new fabric ;). I bought a remnant piece of a border print online and when it arrived it was not quite what I expected. I forgot to take a picture but there was too much going on and too big a difference between light and dark. Which made me creative (good!) and I used the dark part for a skirt and the lighter part for a top. I won’t wear those together though they come from the same piece of fabric. Pictures of the skirt in another post.
For the top I used the Esme pattern from StyleArc.




I had a top in mind I had copied from a BurdaStyle magazine many years ago, guessing it was from an issue published in the (early) nineties. But in the great purge I let go of that pattern thinking “I haven’t made it all those years, so it can go”. Of course it now was on the back of my mind and when I was searching for a pattern to use for the remnants of the fabric that top seemed the pattern I needed. Then this StyleArc top appeared in the Pattern Review gallery and the neckline was quite similar to the BurdaStyle pattern I was thinking of. Bought the pdf in the Etsy shop, traced the pattern (as described in a previous post here) and made it in an evening. Almost instant gratification.





As I did not have enough length of the fabric I had to make a horizontal seam. The bottom part is on the crosswise grain, against all sewing “rules” to cut in the same grain direction. There was just not enough fabric and this was the only solution, including the horizontal stripe that is not at the most favorable position.



The neckline is wider than the illustration suggests.I interfaced the collar with Pro Sheer elegance light interfacing. Both the collar and the interfacing were cut on the bias. The instructions don’t tell you to interface the collar but I thought it wise, as the fabric, a light ponte knit, would not have a lot of stability. I’m glad I did but still the collar won’t stand up as in the illustration. I quite liked the idea of being able to wear it in two ways, but am satisfied with the folded collar, which looks nice on me. I will try to get pictures of me wearing the top.







Finally I topstitched all seams, as indicated in the pattern as one of the ways to finish it.
I like the result of this top, I would not have bought this fabric if I had seen it in a shop, but I’m actually quite pleased with how it looks.