Holiday shirt & top from Maker’s Atelier

I made two versions of the short-sleeved shirt by The Maker’s Atelier last summer, I love ‘em and wore them constantly. One was plain white and the other was a Liberty print voile which I embellished with fancy stitches.

I wore it on the second day of The Sewing Weekender 2017, that’s me with the pink fringe on the right!

I wanted to make the hooded version sometime and originally I planned to make it in linen like the photo but on a recent visit to Backstitch near Cambridge I spotted a nice Ponte with an interesting diamond weave that was a little bit brushed on one side which I thought would work well so I bought that instead.

Making it up was pretty straightforward except I wanted to utilise the rows of diamonds and they proved a bit tricky to match up in the cutting out. Eventually I managed to cut it fairly satisfactorily but there’s one or two wonky spots although I think only I will notice them (I hope)

The inside seam of the hood and the back neck are neatened with tape so I used 2 pieces of striped grosgrain ribbon which had come off a gift bag! You never know when these things might come in handy 🙂 

Gift bag ribbon in situ!

There’s a casing that runs around the waist with elastic cord through it but after scoring the striped ribbon for the part that shows I hadn’t got anything else suitable for the casing! I knew I wouldn’t be able to get what I wanted locally so I ordered some navy cotton twill tape and some navy and some grey cord elastic off t’internet. The tape was a tad wide but that’s fine and the elastic was just right. Before sewing the tape on you need to make two eyelets for the elastic to come out through so I reinforced the fabric behind with iron-on interfacing and then made two small round-ended buttonholes, you could use metal eyelets if you have the gadget for this.  The buttonholes were actually bigger than I needed them to be so I didn’t cut the whole thing open, only enough for the elastic to go through.

As I’d bought two colours of elastic I put it to a public vote on Instagram because I came over all indecisive. This is with grey threaded through initially although in the end navy won by a narrow margin.

Before you can thread the elastic though it needs something to thread through! I carefully sewed on the tape on the reverse of the fabric following as best I could a row of diamonds as I went. I’d actually pressed a crease along the line before I started in order to have some idea of where I was heading.

The casing is only narrow so there’s a bit of excess tape, a narrower one would have been better but on one can see it anyway.

In the end I went with the majority vote and used the navy elastic so after slotting it through the ends are passed through metal toggles. I got these in Backstitch too, I think they are ‘Vogue’ brand. The ends of the elastic frayed badly so I used doubled double thread in a needle and hand-stitched them to stop any further fraying.

So that’s pretty much it, the hem still has the deep notches of the shirt version but the hooded one has long sleeves. I used the twin needle to stitch up the hem and sleeves.

I think this will be a really useful cover-up, the fabric isn’t particularly thick but I’ll either layer things under it or it will be ideal for a warm summer evening (although they feel a very long way off yet!)

The Maker’s Atelier patterns are not cheap, in fact they are rather expensive, but they are the sort of chic, timeless styles that you can remake countless times.

Happy sewing,

Sue