Going for gold

While I do have a preference for independent sewing patterns, for reasons I'll probably go into at some point, that doesn't mean I never use the major brands. This one is Burda 6589 (and, yes, I made the poncho thing as well, but I want to focus on the top here). It was a fun make. It was also, as it turned out, very much a learning journey.

First of all, there was getting it to fit. This pattern has zero ease; given that it's designed for stretch knits, I was actually expecting a little negative ease, but zero turned out to work very well for the fabric I chose, because the stretch recovery on it is pretty fierce. Yes, it stretches a lot, but it will then snap back at the first opportunity and you end up with squished boobs, which is not a good look. Anyway, the zero ease made it very simple. I just had to tailor it to my exact measurements.

For the Southbank, fitting to the bust worked really well; for this one I'd have had to alter everything else if I'd done that, and in any case the pattern didn't go up to my bust size. So I made the size 20 with a full bust adjustment, which is really easy on a knitted fabric. For a woven fabric you have to slash the pattern in various places and fit it back together, and maybe even add darts if they're not already present. A knit is much more forgiving; you just need to lengthen the front piece slightly relative to the back piece, add a bit of width at the bustline, and then ease the front piece onto the back piece along the resulting curve.

It was easy enough to work out how much width to add. While the fit was pretty much OK everywhere else, it was going to be 6 cm too small at the bust without alteration, so that meant adding 3 cm to the front (it's cut on the fold). The length was a bit harder. The usual recommendation is to make a toile, but I didn't have any fabric that behaved similarly to the one I was going to use; the closest thing I had was some T-shirt jersey, and the whole stretch on that was very different, both in amount and in recovery. So I ended up messing about with a tape measure and Lady Sangazure (who is my faithful dress form), and working it out from there. Lady Sangazure is not perfect for fitting, because although her measurements are adjusted to be the same as mine, she's a B cup and I'm an E cup, so she's fuller under the bust than I am; nonetheless, for the purpose of working out how much longer the front needs to be than the back, that doesn't matter. I came up with the figure of 2 cm, which seemed reasonable.

Adding 2 cm to the front length was easy. Adding 3 cm to the width proved more complicated. It soon became clear that there was no way I was going to be able to taper such a large addition up to the armscye (tapering it downwards was no problem). It was just too close. I was going to get a weird bulge. So I thought... actually, I do have fitted ready-to-wear tops that I have to wear something under because my boobs pull the armscyes forwards, and if I wear them on their own I'm showing a lot of side bra, which is really not my style. This is probably going to be the same. I'll just move the armscye.

That was a good call; it's not quite so obvious from the photo because I'm sitting down and so it tends to look a bit baggy, but when I'm standing up it's a very good fit. Finally, I had to do a sway-back alteration; I don't normally bother with that for tops (it is always necessary for trousers, however, as my sway-back is quite pronounced), but with this one being so fitted, it was needful. The back piece is supposed to be cut on the fold like the front, so to do that alteration I had to cut it as two pieces, adding a seam allowance, and make a centre back seam.

The fabric is glorious, but it also turned out to be not the easiest stuff to work with. It's a metallic activewear Lycra. Now, obviously, activewear isn't normally my thing; I'm not really cut out to be a gym rat (never was, really, even before I got the mobility/balance issues). So I'd never sewn anything like it before. I had been a little afraid I would have trouble marking it; that was not the problem. The reverse is plain and marks very easily. The problem was that it wouldn't take pins... well, it would, but they'd leave a permanent mark. Thankfully I had clips, though it did sometimes take a bit of ingenuity to get them to hold the fabric where I needed it, given that the depth of each clip is about 1 cm, so if you needed to do something further in than a conventional seam it got interesting.

Some tops have facings. This one doesn't; it has bands, which are such a faff that next time I make one of these I'm using stretch bias binding and that'll be the end of it. (Side note: one of the joys of hand stitching is that it stretches. Machine stitching doesn't unless you either use a trick like zig-zagging or stretch thread.) And the bands would not lie flat, because this fabric simply refuses to take a crease, so I had to topstitch it... but topstitching doesn't look great on metallic gold. What to do?

Ah, yes. I had some gold seed beads. Right, then...

So this thing is topstitched all the way round the neck and the armscyes, and every single stitch is neatly encased inside a seed bead. Why, yes, it was slow. But if there's one thing I really enjoy about sewing, it's being able to convert a bug into a feature like that.

And then, when it was finished, I put it on, and I went... aargh. Let's just say I hadn't bargained for Sibyl.

Necessity is the mother of invention. I just put a couple of massive slits up the side seams, and I always wear it tucked in. I really ought to know that anything tight around the midriff is not going to work on me.

And I wore it to the concert (over a black long-sleeved top) with that skirt I posted about the other day, and a complete stranger wandered up to me and told me I looked amazing. It's so nice when that happens and you can say, "Thank you - I made most of it!"

Oh, and I also made the necklace and the spectacle chain; but those will have to wait for a later post!