Fringe Festival Knit Top

When Stacie posted in December about making her Fringe Festival Knit Top, I immediately downloaded and printed it out.  It's a free pattern from Hot Patterns that you can download from fabric.com here.  It has been sitting next to my printer ever since.  When I was looking to bring something to occupy myself while the bear cub was in surgery, I couldn't find my Kindle and I decided that I would tape the pattern together and trace it with my adjustments while I was waiting.  I actually brought more than one pattern to the hospital to trace, but I had more problems concentrating that I thought I would during the surgery and I pretty much spent the whole time in the hospital after the surgery in the hospital bed with the bear cub.

For the last few weeks I haven't gotten much sleep, mostly worrying about the bear cub and that is one of the reasons that I have been so prolific with my sewing lately.  Now that I'm a little more relaxed, I'm still having issues getting to sleep, almost like I've forgotten how to fall asleep.  So last night, I decided to sew this pattern.  It's listed as a pattern for beginners and it really made me feel like one.  The instructions for the scarf made zero sense to me until I realized that it was meant to be left with unfinished seams, which doesn't really make me happy normally and really didn't work for my one-sided fabric choice.

I ended up changing the scarf piece quite a bit and I also cut off six inches in length.  I was planning on only making my FBA of 2 1/2 inches and a sway back adjustment of 1 inch, but after sewing it together, my darts were two inches under my breasts, so I just serged off 2 inches from the shoulders since it looked like I would still have room for my arms in the sleeves if I did so.  This brought the darts to the right place, but the shirt was still really long, so I cut off four more inches off the bottom.  The other thing I did differently was to finish the sleeves with FOE.  I was planning on using the coverstitch machine to finish them, but even though the coverstitch did the bottom hem and one sleeve fine, for some reason it refused to sew on the other sleeve.  I finally was so frustrated that I took out the seam ripper and removed the stitching from the first sleeve and used bias tape on both sleeves.  I also ripped a small amount of the one sleeve while removing the  coverstitching so one sleeve is about 1/4 inch shorter than the other.  It's sort of underneath the sleeve and I really have to search for it to even see where it was so it doesn't bother me at all.

Despite the fact that making this shirt made me feel pretty incompetent, my final result makes me pretty happy.  If I make it again, I think I will move the dart and only take off 1 inch at the shoulders.  I will widen the scarf so that I can seam it like I did here and have a slightly wider scarf.  I will also add a second sway back adjustment about two inches lower from the first one and cut the front on the fold.  I might actually cut it a little wider if I use a more stable knit than this rayon jersey.

In case you are interested, I thought I would tell you how I made the scarf here.  First, I did as the pattern states and sewed one side of the scarf to the neck opening.  Then, I sewed the ends that were not a part of the neckline right sides together.  I turned them right side out and then zigzagged under the scarf the raw edge of the scarf, the seam of the sewn edge of the scarf to the neckline on the inside.