Admin top

So I have finally managed to do some sewing this week, and have started putting together the top for work from the Burda pattern I talked about in my earlier post. I've called it 'Admin' as I reckon this one will be confined to wear in the office. So the fabric I'm making this from is a sort of creased stretchy crepe - the photo here isn't great but you can probably see it looks all wavy, sort of like stone. It has a LOT of stretch widthways (from selvedge to selvedge - is that widthways?!) and not much lengthways, which has made it really awkward to mark, cut pin and sew (more on that in a second). I have been using a lot of pins...

The pattern is made of four basic pieces - front (cut on the fold), back left, back right and a bit for the collar. The first thing to do was to sew the shoulder seams (ie front to back right and front to back left), which I did on my machine and then neatened the edges with my overlocker.

I should have thought ahead that of course the stretchiness of the fabric would likely mean some adjustments to the settings on the overlocker... after I'd done the first shoulder I realised, and twiddled one of the knobs on the side to try and stop it stretching the fabric out so much. You can see the first seam at the bottom of the pic, and the second at the top. The second seam is far from perfect but much better than the first. Practice makes perfect I guess! Once I'd done the shoulder seams, I neatened to edges of each centre back pieces and then sewed them together, pressing the seams open. The next tricky bit was the collar - mainly because of the floppy fabric.... it has rouleaux loops to fasten at the back and pinning and stitching those was really hard. It also requires hand finishing - the collar piece is an oblong folded over, with the rouleaux loops sandwiched between the short ends, and the inside of the collar stitched to the seam line of the front side of the fold (does that make sense?!). Anyway, I've pinned that and the hand sewing shall have to wait for another day...

I'll post more pictures when I'm done :-)