Ack! Full Speed Stop!

At long last, I get to sit down and sew a project for myself.

Still not up to the 'just for my pleasure' projects...I need some tops for choir this month; our colors are brown and teal. Brown I have...teal, not so much.

I altered up the cap sleeve longer version of Simplicity 3624 and cut it out of some yummy soft teal rayon-blend jersey, then charged into the sewing room thinking I could whip it up tonight, only to find that, um, all the teal thread in my thread stash was a green-leaning teal; my fabric leans more towards blue. It doesn't match.

Hancock's is closed for the night. So I'm bummed. So guess what I'm gonna do first thing in the morning... ;)

But I'll talk a moment about the alterations. Aside from the 'drop the bust' and the fba, I had to do a bit of style adjusting. Click through on the above link and use Simplicity's nifty little magnifying glass to compare the line drawings of the pattern to the photo of the garment. Notice any difference? I've skimmed a few times through the reviews of this pattern and didn't come across anyone who mentioned this in the review.

The line drawing shows all the front gathers to be directly under the little vertical band on the bodice. It's a nice vertical line. The actual garment, though, as shown on the photo, has the gathers extending for a couple of inches on either side of that center front band. To my eye, that loses some of the impact of the vertical.

The finished band is one inch wide, so I took my fabric, before I cut anything out, and sewed a couple of ease lines on one end for about 8", going across the grain as it would be on the top. Then I pulled the ease lines up to gather the fabric as tightly as I could, measured one inch of the gathered up fabric, then pulled the gathers out.

I can gather 4" of fabric up to 1". So, I went back and adjusted the pattern so that 4" on the lower front would be gathered up into the very center only. Since I needed to add a pinch of ease to the overall width (doggone that middle age spread!), I just used the un-gathered width to add it in.

And I was all pumped to whip it up and see if it worked. Oh well. ;)