I bought this Vogue pattern earlier this year, it includes three different tops. OK one I wouldn’t wear but the other two look my kind of top, there’s a waistcoat style one and a sleeveless shirt sort of top.

I’ve been sorting out my stash a bit and I really need to get cracking and sew some clothes. Well if I’m honest I had a bit of a scare recently, we’ve just been trying to eradicate carpet moths from our bedroom, they’re nasty little critters who like eating wool and silk. All seemed to going well until I saw a moth or two in my sewing room! As you can imagine with my stash of beautiful wools this was panic time! I googled it and discovered that two weeks in the deep freeze is enough to kill them…it took some explaining to my OH why the freezer was suddenly full of fabric! I’ve bought several packs of sealable clothes bags from Lakeland and I’m going to keep my fabric in those, protect them from moths and dust.

Having removed all the wool lengths there’s still an awful lot of fabric in my cupboard so I decided to start choosing a length and a pattern and getting on with it.

I’ve had this fabric in my stash for several years, it’s one of those fabrics where you’re not sure why you like it or what on earth you can make from it, but you buy a metre anyway. It’s almost gone to fabric swops a few times but it’s always been saved at the last minute. It’s a colourful batik style cotton with lots of colourful chainstitched swirly lines on it on top of colourful splatters…it’s very colourful, there’s pinks, purples, greens, blues…!

I decided to make it up in the waistcoat pattern, on the grounds that if it was a complete disaster it wouldn’t be the end of the world as I still couldn’t decided whether the fabric was gorgeous or gaudy!! The embroidery makes it fairly bulky too, so a waistcoat would be perfect.

I’ve had a few fitting problems with recent makes being too tight so I re-measured myself (again!) and compared it to the pattern, both to the sizes on the envelope and the actual garment measurements, I cut it out to a 14 bust, grading up to a 16 at the waist and hips.

Being a Vogue pattern there were lots of pieces, for such a relatively simple top there were ten pieces! It’s fully lined with a fly button closing, I decided to use some cotton jam for the lining. This is a fabric I’ve only recently discovered from two on-line fabric sellers. Cotton jam is a mix of cotton and silk, I thought it would be very fine when I ordered some to try, thinking I might make some underwear with it, in fact its like a medium to light weight cotton, feels lovely but too heavy for undies, however it is perfect for lining summer tops and dresses. It would make lovely shirts and tops on it’s own too, but I decided the pale pink I had would work as a lining for my waistcoat top, although it doesn’t look it in the photos, the pink matches the pale pink in the batik!

The way the top was made it was difficult to really check the fit until it was more or less done…and it was huge! Fortunately Helen was around to pin alterations, altogether I took about half an inch on the side seams. It was also cut lower than I like under the arm, I took the should seams in by a similar amount. Luckily it’s made with the lining hand-stitched to a facing along the hem, so it was easy to undo this and reach the insides again.

It’s still not a brilliant fit but I think it’s wearable! I love the fabric now, I think this was an ideal pattern for it, I just need to sort the fit out on my makes. I think when Helen is up this weekend I’ll get her to take my measurements and we can work out where I’m going wrong.