Unintentional back cowl

(or why I don’t sew big 4 patterns)

I finally get back into the sewing room, looking for a nice easy knit top to help ease my hot weather angst and to help me feel productive.

I have a nice summery knit I picked up in Santa Fe when my husband and I were there celebrating our anniversary (sans kids) last month.  It’s some sort of cotton blend from Santa Fe Fabrics (go there if you’re there–the sales staff is friendly and very helpful…their prices and quality are similar to Emma One Sock).  It had pretty similar stretch in all directions, so I decided to play with the grain, cutting the yoke on the crossgrain, the back on grain, and the fronts on the bias.  Should have been a perfect storm of good things, right?

I pulled out Butterick 5429, a now OOP wardrobe pattern with a fun cut-on sleeve with a front neckline twist.

I don’t have much to complain about in the way of directions–they yield a fine top.  I suppose from the drawing here you can see that the twist leaves a rather large “loop” open to the world.  Really it’s more of a gaping 2″ hole, so I unstitched my topstitching on the loop and stitched up the CF seam until I reached the twist after I had finished all of the other raw edges.  Annoying, but it was not unexpected and it’s an easy fix.

It’s a little annoying that I can’t wear 90% of my necklaces because the height of the neckline twist is right where my necklaces sit.  Annoying because I’m a necklace wearer, but this is a cosmetic problem.

My issue with this pattern is that it’s enormous.  It doesn’t bother me so much that I had to take in the sides a little bit (I exaggerate again–according to Butterick’s sizing charts, there’s 5″ of bust ease on an 8 and something like 9″ of waist ease for this “close fitting” top), but the neckline is so absurdly wide–hence the unintentional back cowl.

If I were to wear the shoulders where they actually lie on the top, they are 1.5″ too wide on either side.  3″? on an 8?  This is wackadoodle.

And this is my frustration with big 4 patterns.  Some of them are sized perfectly fine, and others might as well be muu-muus made by a tent maker.  When I sew a 32 in Burda/Ottobre/or Jalie, I get a 32.  Period.  No guessing.  It’s not falling off my shoulders and creating back cowls because of a too wide neckline**, it’s a 32, and it’s going to fit.  So what if I have to spend a little time in crazy tracing land getting my eyes a little crossed.  If the end result is something that is constructed well, has great details, and above all FITS, I will happily trace away.

It makes me rethink my resolution to purchase what otherwise looks like a very pretty Butterick 5796.

My full review is here.  I promise it’s not too vengeful.  I gave it a “OK but did not work for me” rating.  It’s wearable, but not comfortable in the way I’ve grown accustomed to wearing.

**The knit that I’m using is fairly lightweight here.  On beefier, heavier knits I would guess that the weight of the faux cowl would be distributed across the shoulders and the shoulder seams fall would off the edge of the shoulder instead of creating a back cowl.  This was the first fitting challenge that I had to overcome when I started garment sewing.  I initially thought it was a problem with CB and for a while I was darting out the neck at CB or cutting down CB and making a seam there and narrowing it down the whole seam.  Both of those narrowed the neckline for sure, but came with their own problems like “poofy neck”.  It was a revolution to me when I discovered I could just cut a smaller size in the neck and shoulders and not have that problem.  It’s taken me years to understand that Burda’s drafting is consistent enough in the neck and shoulders to be trusted.  Whatever company you use the most–spend time figuring them out and stick to your findings–you will have a lot fewer wadders, I promise!

Adaptation

As I said in my last post, I’m starting to understand how you can take certain elements that worked from other patterns and apply them to new ones.

When I realized that I was in great need of some basic tops, the first thing I pulled out was my Jalie scarf collar top.  I love how it fits.  It has a nice slim fit in the arms, and the rest is body conscious without being tight or tacky.  But how many scarf-collared tops can you really have?  For me–2–one non-pregnant, and one maternity version.  But don’t toss out this pattern because the scarf is limited in use.  The scarf is just a glorified binding–change it a little and you have a v-neck.

So I pull out Butterick 5386, which is now unfortunately OOP.  It has some nice neckline options.  I’ve made the shawl collar mock wrap and wore it to pieces, and the basic v is so handy.  What’s not handy about this pattern is how much extra fluff there is in it.  When I made it, I was just learning about fitting myself and did a full-on FBA and ended up having to take something like 5″ out of *each* of the side seams and it was still large on me (clearly I had no idea what I was doing then).  Even without an FBA, there’s way more extra room in this pattern then in the Jalie.  But I wanted a v-neck.  How to make it work…

1.  Mark the stitching lines on both patterns.  In this case, Jalie has 1/4″ SA’s, and Butterick has 5/8″ (which is so so silly in knits, but I digress).

2.  Overlay the patterns, lining them up at CF.  What I noticed was that the neck edge is pretty similar in both patterns–there’s a little more fabric AT the neckline on the Butterick, but that’s mostly because the collar takes up some of that room on the Jalie pattern.

3.  Tape some extra tissue to the pattern you’re changing and trace the stitching line of the neckline from the other pattern.  I raised CF by 1″ because without the covering benefit of the scarf collar, CF is a little too low for me on the Jalie pattern.

4.  Add a seam allowance to your new neckline.  It took a while for me to like 1/4″ sa’s, but I’m a fan now.

5.  Change the back shoulder seam to match the front.  I needed a little wedge that I blended into the back neckline with my French curve.

To finish the neckline, I cut a crossgrain strip of fabric 1.25″ wide.  I folded it over, pressed and applied it per Sarah Veblen’s method in this video.  If I had used a wider binding, I might have used Sandra Betzina’s wrap over technique that I wrote about here, but since my finished strip was so skinny, I sewed out a teeny dart in the binding only at CF as I’ve seen on some of my RTW tees.

The best part of this whole process was that start to finish, I had a t-shirt in 90 minutes.  It probably would’ve been quicker even than that but I was flustered for being in the middle of packing for San Diego while I was making the shirt.

To finish it, I used Sherrill’s lovely knit flowers tutorial and had me some nice hand sewing time in the car around San Diego.  I need to tack them down some more as they look kind of droopy after the wash.  How do you launder embellished shirts without them going to bits?

I forgot to mention that the fabric is rayon jersey from Elliott Berman that I got when they had their 50% off anniversary sale some months ago.  This is the best quality rayon jersey I’ve used besides the Milly print that I got from EmmaOneSock.  It’s dense and light and drapes ever so nicely and feels like silk against your skin.