Tunic Top

I went shopping in York on Saturday and saw many tunics, long tees, long sweaters and the like worn over leggings. I’ve been on the lookout for a summer weight top to go with my new leggings but somehow nothing was right. The finish quality on the two or three things I found that I thought would fit/were affordable was frankly dreadful. I think the worst example was a very cute sweater dress in white lightweight knit with multi stripes which had been constructed with black overlock thread and the machine had suffered a tension problem. The raglan sleeves had a black seam showing all around the armhole and the fabric was obviously too lightweight for the amount of thread used to stitch it, and would soon tear away. I came home glad that I could sew and went through my stash that very afternoon in search of a suitable style of fabric. Whilst the garment I made is not a copy of any item I saw (I never seem to manage to have suitable patterns and fabrics in the stash to knock things off properly the way others do), I think it is fairly close to the spirit of the garments I had seen.

The fabric is a John Kaldor print knit which I bought in a “show frenzy” last November and got home and thought “oh dear, what on earth do you want to be.”
Well, this is obviously what it wanted to be. It was just biding its time.
The pattern is Marfy 1652, a free pattern from 2008 for a tunic dress. The original pattern is for a woven and has a lovely cross over front, cut on sleeves, a tie belt inserted into the dress and a straightish skirt portion. I was just a few inches short on the fabric width and couldn’t get the dress out as it was designed, which was frustrating Instead I used the back pattern piece twice, cut on the fold, and used one for the front. Easy. Cut a scoop neck for the front by using my scoop neck tee pattern as a guide and shortened the dress about six inches to make it more of a short tunic length.

When I got it made up and put it on the dressform, the scoop neck was too low and had widened a bit due to the weight/drape of the fabric. So, I pinned out five little pleats in the centre front neckline and caught them into the neckline binding.

The neckline is bound with black lycra from my bindings box. Every so often I go through my box of fabrics “too large to throw away, too small to make a whole item out of”, and cut all the suitable fabrics into strips (bias for wovens, straight for knits). The resulting box of bindings takes up much less room than the original odd shaped scraps did, and means when I suddenly take it into my head to make something, I can often find a binding that will work.

The tunic top is shown both with and without a belt. The belt needs shortening. I got it in the sales a couple of years ago and didn't look at the size... and of course found when I got it home that I had bought a size large. Doh!