Tanks and a boohoo Burda

Have I ever confessed here that I’m an airhead? I have problems dealing with reality. In sewing terms that means I love imagining and creating mental images of the clothes, and have a harder time doing the actual sewing with the actual fabric. And also, I can be suckered easily by a great envelope photo, disregarding the line drawing. The photo is fantasy, the line drawing is reality. I know all of you are nodding your heads at that.

So, after I downloaded a Burda yoga coverup, a kind of capelet, based on a gorgeous photo, I should have paid attention to the slightly queasy feeling I got every time I looked at the line drawing. Right? You don’t ignore the queasiness and hope it goes away. Sheesh.

Thankfully I didn’t go for the velvet right away.

I found a large chunk of cotton knit fabric at Our Social Fabric just before I cut into the velvet whose due date was expiring in my stash. It’s a thick doubleknit, very stretchy across the grain, with almost none vertically. The problem? I don’t like neck gathers. I really don’t like neck gathers. I’m not sure they showed a front photo on the Burda website. They showed a sideview, like this.

It looks nice from the side, doesn’t it?

I like the hood. I’ll wear this for a while at home in the morning chill. Then I expect I’ll cut it apart and use the fabric for a teeshirt. Maybe a teeshirt with a hood?

On the plus side, I decided to cut apart an old tank top and use it as a pattern for some ordinary cotton doubleknit that I had and wanted to experiment with. I made a tshirt before from a simple  cotton doubleknit, but it skimmed the body and just didn’t look right. I wanted to make something with negative ease, suspecting that’s what the fabric is really for.

I ended up making three, all identical, except for this one, which has contrasting neck and arm bands because I ran out of the charcoal.

I love tanks. I had several, but they’ve all gotten too old, too worn and too short. This experiment worked! I’d model all three, but hey, they’re identical 🙂 They’ll get a lot of use as undershirts for winter and then see the light of day in summer.

When I picked up the stripped fabric for the capelet, I also got a couple of metres of “mango” coloured technical wool. I was going to use it for a long-sleeved undershirt, but now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just go for another couple of tanks. What do you think?