Rae's Spring Top: Blue Ice Cream Top
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| I like this shot for some reason, blurry and unmade up. |
Those of you who have followed this blog for awhile have already seen this top in its previous form (right here). I started this one last summer at the Weekend Sewing Workshop in Vermont (btw, am going to Heather's NEW YORK workshop this fall, am SO excited!!!) and by the time I left it was mostly finished but not hemmed. It sat in my closet all winter while I deliberated on how to make it a little more interesting. I love this blue Anna Maria Horner voile, but I felt the plain top still needed something. Lace? Some sort of embroidery? Heather had suggested doing some Mexican embroidery but my skills weren't quite up to that challenge. Then Anna Maria Horner came to the rescue with this post where she showed some very simple but lovely embroidery on a skirt for her daughter. About the same time, Dana posted these awesome sprinkle shirts that I loved. I decided this would be perfect for the neckline, and I'm really pleased with the result:
It's just enough detail to be interesting, but yet it doesn't take away from the lovely design (the pattern was adapted at the Weekend Workshop by Liesl Gibson from her Ice Cream dress pattern for children; she recently developed the Lisette women's pattern line as an answer to requests for the Oliver+S patterns in adult sizes). While the Ice Cream dress pattern is adorable on children, its blousy tunic style is a little trickier to fit on all sorts of women's bodies (Liesl mentions in this blog post that the Portfolio Tunic was Lisette's answer to the Ice Cream dress). Liesl made one for herself (which looked absolutely stunning on her petite figure, have spent way too much time looking for this post and can't find it!), but I decided on me it looked better with a fitted waist:
I'm not sure if you can see this in the picture above or not but the elastic thread shirring was done with colors that matched the neckline embroidery, a slightly more time-consuming detail that will probably never get noticed. It fits nicely at the waist with 5 rows of shirring. By the way maybe this will be useful to someone else so I'll mention it: I finally figured out how to do elastic-thread shirring on my front-loading-bobbin Bernina; if you use that little screwdriver that came with the machine to loosen the bobbin screw 180 degrees (so one half turn) and then thread the elastic thread through the bobbin as usual, it works on voile like a charm!! Have I mentioned how much I love this voile? I just finished a dress for Clementine in this blue color as well and I can't wait to show you!
