Vogue 8792

So, as I mentioned before, I struggle with creating comfortable, wearable clothing appropriate for the hotter temperatures during our summer months.  I'm just not that in to summer.  I've also found that I keep making the same two TNT patterns for basic knit tops and decided I need to expand my repertoire.  I went through my pattern stash (not a quick process) and pulled several patterns for simple tops that I have not previously made.  One of these was Vogue 8792, which I picked up a few months back when Vogue released their summer patterns.  I thought the angular seam lines were interesting.  I decided to make a version of view A-B-C.

I also had this piece of rayon/lycra knit from Fabric.com for which I was having difficulty finding an appropriate pattern.  I ordered 1 1/2 yards of the fabric and when it arrived I discovered it was pulled off grain.  Washing the fabric helped straighten out the grain, but resulted in losing several inches on each end because the cut edges were now uneven.  With less fabric than expected, and a lot of body to cover, none of my regular patterns would work.  View A-B-C of this pattern has only two pieces--a front and a back.  Additionally, these pieces are placed on the cross-grain, rather than lengthwise.  This worked perfectly for my limited fabric.

The one fitting issue I anticipated when looking over the pattern was the sleeves.  This top has cut-on cap sleeves.  These type of sleeves often are cut too narrowly to fit around by biceps comfortably and also usually hit just at the widest part of my biceps, which just makes me look even heavier than I am.  A little flat-pattern measuring indicated I would not be happy with the sleeves as drafted.  Now, this pattern does not have a normal shoulder seam.  Rather, the right shoulder of the front wraps around to the back, and the opposite shoulder on the back wraps up and over to the front.  To make my sleeve alteration, I sort of eyeballed where the shoulder line would be, sliced from the sleeve hem to the neckline and spread the pattern to add approximately an inch in width to the sleeve at the hemline narrowing to nothing at the neckline.  I also added about 2 inches in length to the sleeve hem.  Below is a photo of my rather down and dirty alteration.

I then cut my fabric and stitched it up.  This is one of the easiest sews ever.  Two short seams, two longer seams, a neckline finish and a couple of hems.  Here is the result:

I did cut the pattern out one size larger than I would normally choose for a Vogue pattern.  I wanted this to be rather loose-fitting for summer.  When the temperatures get up to around 90F or better (it was 98F when I was driving home from work today), anything close-fitting or at all constricting makes me feel like I'm suffocating.  I need some air flow!  All in all, a quick and easy pattern with fairly good results, but I'm not sure I'm that enamoured of it that I would sew it again.  I wore it to work today with a pair of ivory linen slacks and turquoise strappy flat sandals.  It made a nice summer outfit and was very comfortable.

Finally, I noticed on my last post that Kelley posted a comment in which she requested info on my method for binding necklines on knit tops.  My method is a fairly common one using a stitch-flip-topstitch process which is shown in many sewing books, blogs and probably Youtube videos, but I still thought I would try to take photos of the process when I sew my next top and blog a little mini-tutorial of the method.  Is it worth doing?