My first attempt

I was really excited when I was choosing which pattern to start with, though I feared the whole thing might end in a pile of shredding tissue paper and a load of wasted fabric. Thankfully I had bought a load of really cheap cotton in a few basic colours so I wasn't so fussed about cocking things up.

The pattern I chose to start with was from the 'Very Easy Vogue' section of the pattern catalogue... I chose the version in the top right of the picture, no complicated sleeves! It has no buttons or zips either, you just slip it on over your head. It has a yoke which sort of lines the inside at the back and the front. The tricky bits were sewing on the bias binding around the armholes in a curved shape (maybe I wasn't pressing the binding properly but it was a tight curve and there was quite a lot of slack), and hand sewing (DOOM) the shoulders together. That and following the pattern - it sounds so obvious but on my first attempt at using a pattern I really found it tricky to understand what some of the steps were getting at. Luckily this is where VogueSewing came in handy.

I made two of these in the end. The first in a mint green cotton with grey satin binding at the armholes, and the second in a Liberty lawn which was actually really nice to sew with and iron. They are both sweet on. I hemmed them both to a level just below jeans waist (which is actually quite low on me) as I didn't want them to be thigh length.

For the second attempt, I managed to get the yoke the right way around; for the first one, the curved yoke - which is actually meant to be at the back - somehow ended up at the front. Looking back, that perhaps explains why it was slightly too wide at the front and I had to put in a couple of tiny tucks to take up the excess... d'oh. The second time I managed to get the yoke right. I also bound the inside seams with seam binding for the second one, which looks so neat! Well - for me anyway, it's all relative.