She sews sea shells on the sea shore

I’ve noticed that lots of bloggers give exciting names to their creations, and I have been pondering long and hard about what to call this top… Let me introduce the Sea Shell top. Sea because of the gorgeous shimmering turquoise colour (sadly I do not have any first-hand evidence of this to show) and shells because of the scalloped edge.

I have had this silk in my stash for a couple of months since my brother bought it (and some purple) back from his travels Thailand. The fabric was fairly stiff, and after some advice from the lovely people on The Sewing Forum, I was brave enough to pre-wash it to soften it and start work.

I used Simplicity 2938 view B as the base. I added about 3 inches to the length and added some extra room around the bust on the centre panel, but the pattern was actually a pretty good fit after adjusting the front gathers. The pattern does have a zip, but even after modifications I was able to pull it on over my head so gave the zip a miss (since there weren’t any good colour matches when I went shopping). I made a wearable toile using some left-over fabric (glad I wore the toile as it was only while moving around I decided the sleeves were a bit snug) so felt pretty confident to finally cut up the silk.

I wanted to make sure my first attempt at sewing silk was done well (I even made my own bias-binding for the armholes using this clever little tip). The toile I made was fine, but I thought it might look a bit dull in the plain silk. I decided to have a go and try to add some scalloped detail to the hem, since apparently they are the big trend this summer. I read a really great tutorial about scallops somewhere, either online or in a magazine, who knows – I can’t find it now! In my searching for it I found some good tips from Tilly and the Buttons, although I’m not sure my scallops are as rounded as hers. Even if they aren’t perfect I really like the effect the effect they create.

Pictures were taken with my new-to-me Canon DSLR – I am going on a mini photography course this weekend so hopefully I will learn how to use all the features properly then!

Oh, and lets not forget a close-up of the most important part of the top…
… one of the new labels I got for my birthday!

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