First there was this...
The original Cute as a Button baby jacket that I made in January.
The Whale Jacket: a size bigger and a teeny bit tweeked from the original.
And I thought, that's a useful little pattern, I wonder what else I could do with it.
But the sleeves - well, the wrists - turned out to be too tight and I could just only get Baby S's hands through them.
So I cut them back and added a little cuff...
But I didn't like the seam across the top of the sleeve, so I altered the pattern to make raglan sleeves instead, top stitched the sleeve seams, added little vents in the side seams, and took a really wonky photo of it...
And then I thought, I still really like that original Charlie Tunic which is made in linen rather than cotton jersey. So I was going to make a Bomull tunic version (which admittedly is cotton not linen) but Baby S was having a bad eczema week and didn't like pulling his arms through sleeve holes, so I decided to make life easier for him and made this...
Which admittedly needs ironing but there's no space to unfold the ironing board at the moment!
I think it looks a bit like something a Chinese Mandarin would wear, but perhaps that's just me. I kept the raglan sleeves and the vents in the side seams, and added 1cm to each front half to enable a bit of overlap for buttonholes (yay! for a sewing machine that makes button holes!).
So, despite the fact that I originally grumped about the miniscule seam allowances, I think I can say that all in all it's quite a versatile and alterable pattern. I still intend to make a linen/cotton pull-over-the-head version, and there is also a half-made dressing gown version waiting to be finished, so I think we can officially call this my first sewing frenzy of 2011.
Happy Monday!
(ps. the binding for the shirt and the blue top are both Kaffe Fassett.)
