Spring sunshire and a flower top

Yes folks, it's spring in Edinburgh and today there was glorious sunshine. Yay! So after finishing my current project I decided to go outside and take some photos of it for this post. Lovely sunshine...but a biting cold wind...the things I do to try and make this blog just a bit better! Enough of my moaning, here's the finished top. I actually like the bleached out look to the background of these photos, am I weird?

The fabric has a lovely print, a kind of free-form cream, white, brown and beige flower and leaves and there's also a bit of lilac there in the shading too. All of this on a background of a not black but a very, very dark navy. If you put it against navy, it looks black, if you put it against black it looks navy. You know what I mean! And that's probably the reason why it was on sale at John Lewis a month or so ago. The print was also printed along both selvedges of the fabric. I basically bought a number of print repeats - one repeat for the front, two repeats for the sleeves and two repeats for the back as there's a zip in the back, the back seam is shaped and on top of that there's pattern matching to do. I don't think I did badly on the pattern matching. And I bought another repeat 'just in case'. 

This fabric was half price. And it's a decent thickness of probably polyester, nope, no natural fibres in this!That was a tricky one to lay out for cutting to get the pattern placement right. It was impossible to get both sleeves identical as you have to turn the pattern piece over for the second sleeve. You can see what I mean now that I've pointed it out. I had the fabric in a single layer when cutting out just so I could do the best I could for pattern placement. I feel that's worked out well. 

Which pattern did I use? None other than my favourite Simplicity1364. Looking back through my makes I see that I haven't used this pattern this year. Shock! It's high time I did, then. 

I'd just like you to know that I'm wearing RTW jeans in these photos. I played no part in the creation of these jeans! I have got some black stretch denim that's patiently waiting to be pre-washed before I dig out the Named Jamie jeans pattern again but I just know that the black dye from the fabric will dye everything else it's washed with so I'll wait till I build up a 'safe load'.

It's a holiday weekend so I was busy sewing today and there will be more sewing over the next few days too. Bliss!