Thank you all so much for your words of encouragement on my last post. I am pleased to report that I feel significantly better than last weekend already, just by eliminating some foods, which definitely points to it being a nutritional issue than anything more serious, thankfully. I’m already very much looking forward to adding foods back in one by one in a few weeks to see which is the culprit, though! Because of everything in September, I didn’t have time or energy to document or post about the few things I made which aren’t top secret, like this quick knit top!
I actually made this the day we landed back from Argentina. I worked out a few years ago that if I get even a few hours sleep on an overnight flight and then force myself to stay awake through the day I arrive, I’m recovered from jet lag the following day. So once the laundry was on and my suitcase was unpacked, I wanted something easy to sew that would keep me awake, and this little pattern was staring me in the face.
This Simple Sew pattern came free with the September issue of Love Sewing magazine that I’d bought before we went away, and it seemed a perfect mix of easy enough to sew on jetlag, and not requiring me to buy anything. Simple Sew patterns seem to only exist as magazine covermount patterns as far as I can tell, and I don’t see this #015 Jersey Top listed on their site, either. If you want to buy it for yourself, I’m not really sure what to suggest!
I shopped my stash since this only required a meter of fabric, and I came up with this bamboo jersey from Jersey Fashion that was leftover from my Kimono Sweat View B sample – I wanted to be able to give my athlete model Lorna a choice of colour and she chose red, so the teal was left for me. It’s super soft and drapey and really lovely to wear, so just about perfect for this top. For something different, I chose some contrast orange ribbing for the neck and sleeve bands, but since this was offcuts from a ridiculously long vest (tank) top I’d been given at a running event, I didn’t have enough for the hem band so I just turned and coverstitched that instead.
Worn with my birthday jeans from earlier this year
Even in my jet-lagged haze, I could see that the sleeve drafting was wack on this – the hem comes to a point at the seam! Seriously, did no one sanity check this pattern before releasing it? Even if you weren’t trying to attach a hem band (and were just folding under and twin needle stitching), this would be a massive problem.
Since I didn’t catch this until I was ready to attach the bands, I just had to cut off the excess and live with the sleeves being a little shorter.
The other major error in this pattern is that the tech drawing is wrong! The view with the cross-back has dolman sleeves, but the banded tee view that I made has raglan sleeves. This is a scarily big detail to get wrong, and makes me wonder what exactly is going over at Simple Sew HQ…
But apart from those two errors, I ended up with a nice, easy-to-wear teeshirt in the end. The body of the tee has a ton of ease – normally it would be pulled in by a hem band, but as I mentioned before, I didn’t have enough orange ribbing so I omitted that. The bateau neckline is wide enough to add interest, but not so wide that my bra straps show, so that’s definitely a mark in its favour! I made the size 12 according to my measurements, but I could’ve easily gone done to a 10 or possibly even an 8 considering the pattern ease and the stretchiness of my fabric.
Considering that the value for me was in the act of making this (and staying awake) rather than the actual end result, it’s nice that I really do have a wearable, if simple, tee to add to my wardrobe in the end. The turquoise/orange colour combo is one of my favourites, too, so it should get quite a lot of wear!