This is the first BWOF garment I have made and besides a few fitting issues that I have found now I am wearing it for the first time, I am really happy with the outcome.
First of all I really appreciate the Reviews at PatternReview so before I even traced the pattern I was aware of a few issues.
1. The neck line was a bit lower than most of the reviewers liked, so I added 1cm.
2. The bottom hem on the front of the top is actually curved at the bottom (you can see the curve line that I drew when tracing the pattern) it ends up following the edge of the bottom of the band. This is not how I want to wear my tops, so I added to the bottom of the front pattern so that it was the same length as the back pattern.
3. Others commented about the fullness in the front gathers, so I took out 1cm in the width above the horizontal dart to reduce this fullness.
4. The band is rather wide so I took out two lots of 1cm from the width to make this smaller as well.
These adjustments are in addition to my standard adjustments e.g. rounded shoulder, high round back, sway back and gaposis on the front neck edge.
So without further ado, here is the finished top
As you can see it is pulling in the front around the armholes and I need to deepen these as they are “cutting” into me and I’m not sure if this will fix the pulls in the picture, I will have to see. This will be a bit of a challenge as I have sewn the seams with my overlocker and can’t afford to make this top any tighter LOL.
My Janome CP1000 was christened for this project, and after doing the first lot of hems on the band, the sigh of relief that resulted with no tunnelling that I continually suffered with twin needles on my sewing machine was immense and even though I did have to "frog stitch" the hem, after reading Debbie Cook's Coverstitch Tutorials I found the secret to doing these.
