The Act of Sewing Shirt, Orange gingham

I’ve started digging in to Sonya Philip’s new book The Act of Sewing (see previous post), which is a great resource for someone getting started in garment sewing, or who wants to make a good and simple set of clothes, or who is ready to learn how to modify patterns for fit and style. 

Make It Your Own

To start preparing for the first class, I made the top over the weekend; I started prepping the pattern on Friday and finished it in time to wear to an outdoor party on Saturday evening.

Tracing the pattern. Four pieces in all for this top.

All of the pattern pieces are printed on 6 sheets of large paper. Some pieces overlap one another but it’s fairly easy to see the simple shapes. Each of the nine sizes has a different style of line which is labeled on a legend. I used exam table paper to trace—you can use freezer paper, pattern tracing paper, Swedish tracing paper. You may want to trace all the pattern pieces at once if you think you’ll make multiple patterns.

Layout

I’m going to tell y’all a secret: I don’t embrace the fussiness required to match plaids when I’m sewing, so I usually just avoid it. But this time, I simply didn’t worry about it. And I’ll encourage students in this class to not worry about pattern matching either. 

To quote Sonya Philip, 

“In order to learn, you need to allow yourself to be a beginner.”

The finished top along with some early summer blooms.

This is a great easy wearing top and I am looking forward to teaching some new sewists to make it!