I actually finished another top for myself this week. Yay me. 🙂 When I bought the gray and blue knit fabric, I picked up this blue and cream lace fabric as well. Because this fabric is super duper thin, I wanted to try out the gray shirt first for practice. That one turned out so well, I decided to go ahead and experiment again. This time I went for a boat neck look with a capped sleeve. The great thing about this shirt is that is is only 2 pieces- the front and the back…no sleeves to insert!

I used the same dimensions as my last shirt (except I made it a teeny bit bigger since this fabric is not as stretchy) and cut out a big rectangle, angling the rectangle out from the bottom of the sleeve area to the top of the shirt to allow for the capped sleeve look that I wanted. I did add some ruching to the sides but it’s barely noticeable because I tried to do less ruching this time and ended up doing too little. However, check out how well I did at matching up the stripes!! Pretty proud of myself for that I must say. 🙂

See… stripes matched so well!

The hardest part of this shirt was figuring out what to do with the sleeve and neckline hem. Because the fabric is so thin, I didn’t want to mess it up, and I really have no idea what I’m doing with these knits! If I had the rolled hem foot for my Bernina, I would have used that because I just learned how to do that in my machine mastery classes. But, alas, I have yet to purchase that foot. I ended up folding the sleeves under 1/4″ and sewing a small hem, and adding a thin band to the neckline. Neither one turned out as great as I was hoping, but they’ll work. I left the bottom hem raw edge just like the other shirt.

I want to add that I also learned the stretch stitch at my machine mastery class this week so I used that for all the seams and hemming. Hopefully that aids in the durability of the seams. I decided not to add any embellishments to this shirt because the fabric is really so pretty by itself and I don’t want to detract from that. Oh and editing pictures of your hugely pregnant self is a bit of an awkward and humbling event… Am I really that big? Yikes! Can’t believe I’m putting these out on the blogosphere, but I’m trusting you’ll be gentle with the pregnant lady. 🙂

Next up is the promised final rendition of parsley pants! I decided to wait to post those until Monday as my intro into Kid’s Clothes Week…Surely having a finished project to post from the very beginning will keep me motivated to get lots done! That wraps up Spring Top Sewalong for this year…. hopefully it won’t be an entire year before I do some more selfish sewing though!