The top was a recycled adult beach skirt, with a nice wrap around feature at the back, and the skirt was this nice whales and sailing boats thin knit fabric, which was an on-line purchase. You can find out how to make similar clothes after the jump.
The skirt was easy. She loves blue, and this fine jersey print with whales and sailing boats should meet her 'no flowers, no princesses, definitely no pink' clothing preferences.
This was super simple to make. I had the 2" blue elastic from another (adult) skirt that had bitten the dust, but the waistband was still in good condition. Having cut a rectangle of the knit fabric about twice Fleur's waist, by about the length I wanted the finished skirt, I sewed up a back centre seam, and then just attached the skirt top to the elastic waistband while stretching the waistband.
It is difficult to get the inside as neat, as the stretching means it's hard to keep the stitching in a straight line. But you don't see the inside when it's being worn.
Finally, I turned up a hem of about an inch or so, and zigzagged it. If you had a serger you could use that but I don't. I've also not been able to succeed in using a double needle, which would be the other way of finishing it. I think the zig zagging looks quite nice.
Now for the top. I invented this myself. I actually used a nice (adult) beach skirt with a wavy bottom for this, but you could do the same thing with any fabric. In a later post, I'll suggest how to do this.
What I wanted to do was to have it wrap round the back, so there were two free hanging layers, stitched together only at the top and armholes. This isn't the completed top, but it will give you the idea of what I mean,
I started with the front and back pattern pieces from this free pattern in size 5 from Climbing the Willow. It's decribed as a basic bodice pattern, and so it can be adapted to make a variety of tops and dresses. Thank you to Climbing the Willow!
I folded my skirt (a shorty beach skirt) in half, and first laid the bodice front on the fold. I laid it well above the finished hem of the skirt, to make a hip length top, and then laid the bodice back pattern piece so it slightly overlapped at the arm pit. This way I would avoid the need for side seams. As you can see, I also flared it out a bit at the bottom, as I wanted it to flow loosely.
You can probably see that the bottom of the back is getting closer to the hem. If you are using your own fabric rather than limited by an existing garment, you wouldn't necessarily need to do it like that, but I liked the shape I was making, which would produce a nice curved hem.
To make an ordinary bodice, that might be all you'd need to do, but I wanted my bodice to have a wrap-over effect, so I wanted to have two backs. There are two ways you could do this.
One, you could duplicate the back bodice pattern, and add that to the folded material - again, overlapping the top and flaring the bottom out. This is my recommended method. Thus:
Or, you could fold the excess fabric into the centre, so you are cutting the back pattern twice. That's what I've done below (after cutting out) because I was too lazy to duplicate the pattern. But I would say duplicating is a better way, as you can tweak the angles you want in your flare more easily.
In the picture above, you have not only the fold on the left for the centre front, but two folds on the right so that the back bodice is cut out twice, like this:
In fact, you don't need to make the back bodices completely overlap, it would still look pretty if you cut it short of the side seam and just joined it into the armholes, but I already had my finished edges from the skirt. All you need to do is cut each back wide enough to include at least the more vertical part of the armhole. And make sure you cut a nice curve for the hem.
To make up the top, I first wrapped one back over.(right sides together, if you have a right and wrong side to your fabric) .......
...and then the other back .....
.... and sewed up the shoulder seams. Because this was a knit fabrics, there was no need to finish the seams. Then, I flipped the top the right way out, and tacked the back two layers together at the neckline and the back armholes, so they wouldn't slip about.
Now, you may have noticed in the earlier picture, that the original beach skirt had some long strings to tie it round the waist. No? Well, here it is again. See the strings at the top? They were left over and cut off at the cutting stage for my top.
I unpicked these strings, and they made the perfect neck and armhole bindings. I attached them first to the outside, joining them at the ends. Then I pinned them over to the inside - the stage you can see below - and sewed them by hand to the inside. (You could do this by machine.)
An alternative would be to use T shirt rib, or stretch bias binding, or make your own from the main fabric. The binding as finished were 3/8", so if making your own double fold bias bindings you'd need strips 1 1/2" wide (i.e. 4 x 3/8"). If you prefer to make a serged neck binding, you need strips marginally narrower. For my age 5 top, I used about 1.2 m of binding, or about 1.3 yards. I would order 1.5 yards to be on the safe side.
And here's the finished top - back view so you can see the overlapped layers and the pretty frilly hem.
And the front view:
And fortunately, Fleur seems happy to wear her new skirt and top!
In the next post, I'll tell you about the skirt and top I made for her sister, the top using the same Climbing the Willow pattern, but in size 4.
No comments:
Post a Comment