Burda 02/2013 #126 - the little tshirt that took ages

Happy thanksgiving to all my American readers! It's not something we celebrate here in Australia, but there are a few things I'd like to give thanks to - thanks to Toby for choosing not to sleep at night time anymore, it means we get to spend sooo much more time together! Their childhood is so fleeting why would you waste it on a silly thing like sleeping? Thanks also to Toby for passing on his annoying cough to me - it's a great way to work those abs without doing a single sit up. Thanks to Oscar for pulling through his near death experience last week on my birthday no less and is now practically back to normal. Thanks also to family for their wonderful birthday presents of a Japanese sewing book and some new camera lens, and especially to my husband for organising the kids to have a sleepover with their grandparents while we stayed in a fancy city hotel.

And I'm thankful that I've finally finished my latest project: a simple tshirt that turned out to take a long time to finish. Well actually sewing it up didn't take that long, but sewing on the neckband four times until I got it right certainly did!

I used Burda 02/2013 #126 which was made quite successfully by many bloggers when it was first released:

Isn't that model photo from Burda absolutely absurd styling? The whole point of the tshirt is the gathered sleeves, yet the model has a jacket and a scarf covering them up.....

I sewed mine from a mystery knit found deep within my stash, which is very soft and very stretchy. Like Sharon's version, my neckband was very droopy and too big which I also blame on the fabric, and I ended up taking in the neckband incrementally four times, until I ended up with it a smidgen too short (of course!) so there are a few puckers around the neck. Ah well, I can live with it because there was no way I was going to do it again!

Apart from the neckband issue it's a pretty straightforward project - the sleeves are gathered and then just sewn on raglan style so it can't be much easier. I made the smallest size knowing that the significant ease of the knit meant it would be fine size wise and hopefully take care of any fabric pooling at the back since I didn't do a swayback adjustment. Seems fine to me:

I quite like this top - it's as easy to wear as a standard tshirt but the gathered sleeves make it just that little bit different. It's really long though, you can see in that photo above that the hem of the tshirt sits halfway down my skirt that I've tucked it into. If I were to make this again I would definitely shorten it a fair bit because it's too long to wear out but too bulky to tuck in.

Overall it's quite a good pattern, maybe I will make another one day when I've worked myself back up to working with knits. For now though it's back to sewing with well behaving woven fabrics, so much easier and more predictable!