Scoop Top Tunic

Lately I'm very much into yoga pants / leggings and tunics - that's my type of home wear, bed wear and hiking wear. I've got a reasonable amount of yoga pants and I'm not sure I'll be able to sew a descent pair of stretchy pants just on my straight machine, though I've bought a pattern and I'll give it a try. But I can make quite wearable tunics with a straight and zigzag stitch and a stretch needle. And this is the first of the lot, made out of the cheap knit fabric I bought for trials (in my defense it looked better as a roll in the shop :) The fabric is 100% cotton, not very stretchy and the stretch is only in the horizontal direction.

The pattern is a hybrid between Burda 2/2011 shirt #106 B and the Scoop Top. I took the upper part and the sleeves from the Burda T-shirt, but I flared the sleeves a bit and I lowered the neckline; and the underarms part is from the scoop top.

As I had enough fabric, I tried to match the horizontal stripes wherever I could. I added fusible to the shoulder seams for strength and false-flat seamed the shoulder and side seams.

At the front the neck lays pretty flat, but there is a bit of bulging on the back side of the neck - I think I should cut the neck band even shorter next time.

As I liked the length of the tunic exactly as I had cut it and didn't want it not an inch shorter, I decided not to fold the edges, but to process them with a very dense shallow zigzag, imitating an over-locked edge.

And just as I finished my long sleeved tunic, summer finally came with temperatures over 30C today. I have some more of this fabric left, so it is time for a new sleeveless tunic out of it :)

Recent Makes

A few of the things I've been working on lately:

A semi-wearable muslin for the Scoop Top - a free pattern and tutorial by Kristin at the Skirt as a Top blog. I don't have a coverstitch, nor a overlocker machine, but I was curious to try my ordinary sewing machine on knits. For this top I cut an old T-shirt of my husband and used the fabric to create this cute easy top. It is amazing what a difference using the right stretch sewing needle made - now I'm encouraged to buy some knit fabric and try my first real knit top. And I learned some  useful lessons with this muslin, like cutting the neckline band really shorter than the neckline, not just 2 cm shorter, but at least 5 cm shorter, to make it lay flat. Here I had to insert an elastic thread in my neckpiece to make it stay around the neck.

A few days ago I dyed 200g of Italian bobbin merino in this semi-solid teal color and cast on Joji Locatelli's Odysey Shawl. My intention was to make the shawl in gradient teal colors, dyeing the next sections darker and darker, but I loved the first color so much, that I decided to leave it as it is and make the shawl in just this one color. It is a very easy and fairly quick project, I like garter stitch projects, they are relaxing and perfect TV knitting.

A quick macrame necklace out of the yarn for my mother's Christina. I made this almost a month ago, but I keep forgetting to show it on the blog. The idea is from here:

And finally - Christina is done and ready to be gifted to my mother. I plan to make a proper photo session of it later this week, using Gaby as a model.