Apple Green Dilgul Top

I am building a small spring wardrobe for Gaby, as I intend to send her a package to Vienna these days. So far I have only shown you the hoodie, and here is one of the blouses. 

I had a nice quality viscose knit in a fresh apple green color and I wanted to make something flow-y and spring-y from it. I wеnt through my Burda blouse patterns and nothing clicked, so I googled images of long sleeve blouses and came upon these tops with interesting pleated plackets.  

I am always in for a challenge, and I decided to try and make that look, starting from a basic long sleeve pattern. For my base I chose a true and tried Burda long sleeve - Burda 6820.

I left the sleeves and the back as they were and modified the front. I cut the front pattern in seven places at 1.7 cm intervals and added 1.5 cm pleats. If I were to make this pattern again, I would reduce the width of the pleats to 1 cm or 1.2 cm and I would raise the neckline by 3 cm and make it a bit more square, as it is in the original. The way I made it, the neckline sits low enough and does not favour unbuttoning, which kind of makes all this elaborate button closure redundant.

In the original the bottom hem is simply roll-hemmed on the overlocker, but to me this kind of finishing looks a bit cheap, so I decided to hem it with a narrow hem with a double needle.

And one more detail - always finish the neck with the neckband first and then add the Henley placket. I made it the other way round and it proved the wrong way, as the finishing of the placket is not that sharp. Lesson learned, I hope :)

Pattern: Burda 6820 (base), Dilgul Pleated Top (inspiration)

Size: 36, heavily modified to #makethatlook

Fabric: viscose knit, 1 m

Time to make: 4 days

Still, I think it is a nice and different long sleeve, the fabric is extremely pleasant to the skin and i hope Gaby will like it and wear it this spring. And it was a fun #makethatlook challenge.

Raglan Sweater

At the beginning of the month I bought 2 m of cotton knit fabric to make a pair of sweatpants and  a sweater. However, the fabric turned thinner than I thought, more suitable for tops than for bottoms. Nevertheless, I did sew the pants for Alex and he loves them and wears them as lounge pants. I plan to take a few flat pictures of them soon and tell you about the pattern, as he absolutely refuses to act as a model for my blog.

This sweater is the second garment I made out of the remaining fabric - a raglan sweater for my husband. I bought the pattern from the Russian site Shkatulka, size 52. I've sewn quite a few patterns from Shkatulka and this is the first that I'm definitely not happy with - I find the sleeves rather wide for the body and I do not like the amount of fabric under the arms.

Thankfully, the fabric itself is nice and soft and husband, bless his tender soul, not only likes his new sweater, but obligingly acts as my model in it. He was happy to put it on for today's hike.  

 

The modifications I made to the pattern: as it is designed for shorter men, I elongated the body by 6 cm and the sleeves by 3 cm and I added about 1 cm width to the front and back pieces, that is a total of 4 cm added to the width of the body. I did this, as the size 52 seemed a bit snug on my husband, but the next size had even wider sleeves and I wanted to have the slimmer sleeves. I have zero experience with raglan patterns and I didn't dare narrow the sleeves for fear of distorting the raglan lines.

To add a little color to the boring grey, I made the neckline out of blue knit fabric and added blue sleeve cuffs. I also added blue stitching to the raglan lines and the hem, though it is barely visible.

 

Pattern: Raglan Sweater from Shkatulka

Size: 52,a bit modified

Fabric: cotton knit

Thread: grey and navy blue polyester

Time to make: 2 days