Lace Belcarra Blouse

Today I have one of those sods law tales to tell you.  I made the top that I'm wearing months ago, wore it a couple of times and it promptly disappeared.  I was so upset as I really liked it.  I searched for it for ages and eventually I decided it must have been lost when my boyfriend moved house and resigned myself to making another.  Literally about 20 minutes after finishing sewing the new top, I discovered the original one hiding in the back of a drawer!  Oh well, it has been gifted to a friend and I am going to move on with my new top!

I hadn't realised quite how rumpled I look in these photos, they were taken at the end of my holiday and my linen skirt really could have done with an iron!

On my uni days I am surrounded by 23 well dressed women whose clothes I am always staring at and trying to work out whether they would work on me and how I could recreate them.  Thanks girls for the inspiration (sorry boys, I'm not spending much time on your clothes).  Anyway there have been a lot of lace tops featuring in the girls' wardrobes recently which I guess is reflective of the summer trends and I really wanted one.  And so my next Belcarra blouse was born.

I knew I wanted to have the front piece as a lace panel and originally I was considering creating lace sleeves too but having never sewn with lace before, I thought I would keep my life simple and just stick with the front panel so that I didn't need to worry about working out how to hem the lace.

The main fabric is a cotton jersey that I bought from Simply Fabrics in Brixton and the lace was an offcut that I bought on the same trip. Although the Belcarra pattern is not meant for stretch fabrics I thought I would give it a go and it seems to have worked.  I simply tacked the lace panel to the jersey front piece and then just sewed following the instructions.  The only part I changed was that I eliminated the sleeve bands as I wasn't crazy about them on my first version and also I wanted slightly shorter sleeves.

Now does anyone have any other suggestions for top patterns?  I'm always on the look out for good tops, I don't know why but I really find this the hardest pattern to find to suit my body type.

Shirt refashion

Hi all, happy Tuesday!  Today I've got a refashion to share.  This refashion is basically a mash up of two tops; a green mens shirt that inherited from my dad when he decided that the collar had become too worn to be respectable any more and a failed McCalls M6604 top that I made at the same time as the first one which was frustrating as they both had the same fitting issues.  I loved the peacock fabric though, so I hung onto it to use for a refashioning project.  

I decided to use the Belcarra pattern as it lends itself well to mixing two fabrics. I have used this pattern several times before but oddly none of them have made it to the blog. 

I cut the sleeve and neck binding pieces out of the failed top.  You can't see terribly well in the photo above but the shirt had a pocket which I removed, before cutting the body pieces for the Belcarra from the shirt. I wanted to make a feature of the shirt placket on the back of  the top so I cut the back piece of the Belcarra with the placket running down it.  The shirt buttons themselves were boring so I got some self cover buttons (in 2 different sizes)  and covered them with the peacock fabric and stitched them where the original buttons had been.  I also created a little bow to decorate the back with.

Sorry about the massive crease but I had been wearing it around town.

It a party in the back but the front feels a little boring when I can see both sides.  My sister kindly took these photos and she's great at getting creative with shots like this.

We took these on a lovely afternoon out together looking at a boats.  The boats were part of a show, I'm a little sketchy about what the point of this was but there were were pretty old boats that I could look at so I wasn't complaining.  I get a little geeky about old transport.

One of these little boats took part in Dunkirk and has been redone and is still sailing the seas, how cool is that?

This wheel was purely decorative, clearly put there for goofy people like me who like to play with stuff without having to do anything difficult like be outside in the cold and rain or learn to sail.

I thought you might like this totally confused out-take.  I'm not sure what my sister was asking me to do here but it made my face do this:

There are still a few more days left on the giveaway if you want to take part.