Cami Adaptation Gallery

As promised, you can see below the gallery of Cami shirts and shirt dresses:

Clearly I'm a bit of a fan of this pattern, it's definitely not the last one I'll be making. I love the SewOverIt new shirt dress pattern, perhaps I'll be able to get as much variety out of that too!

A & A Cami 3: Shirt Pattern

Good day to you all good fellows. I am back once again from another trip away! What was that people say about resting during pregnancy? Ha ha. No, to be fair these trips have been very restful if not a little sore on the hips. I've worked from home again today so I can recover. 

So I'm back with the last of the adjustment and alteration posts for the Cami pattern. Last week you saw my Cami-Washi hybrid, and I will do a post to show you all of the different iterations of this pattern so far at some point. I hope it goes to show what can be done with one pattern and a few changes. 

Chronologically, after my last Cami shirt I made the Christmas dress that you can take a nosey at here. The one change that I made to the shirt at this stage was to widen the lower half of the armhole. You may remember that in the last installment of A&A I had extended the armhole, so this now fitted well. However, the width across the arm was still tight, especially in the non-stretch of the navy cotton I had used. Therefore I made the following adjustment to the sleeve pattern, 

I began by drawing a straight line down the centre of the sleeve pattern:

I then cut through the sleeve pattern piece, leaving a very small amount of the pattern at the top of the sleeve. This was then used as a pivot point, splitting the sleeve by the amount that I wanted. I ensured that the gap was equal on both sides by measuring the amount from the tip to the base of the split. 

I then re-drew the armsleeve, including in these changes, and removing the angle which was caused at the bottom of the sleeve by the pivoting.

This was a speedy fix and probably caused a bit too much at the bottom of the sleeve, especially on the 3/4 sleeve. This may need a little work if I make another longer sleeved version, but it is perfect for the shorter sleeve. 

I'm wearing the shirt here with the maternity version of New Look 6128, unfortunately it no longer fits. I think I could make another one with a bit of extra pleating, but I've only got four weeks of work left now so I'm not sure if it would be worth it. I'm very happy with the fit of the shirt, though obviously I can no longer close it ha ha. It works tucked in though, and I have some floaty skirts I can wear with it. I made this in a plain fabric for once which I'm proud of. I didn't even add a quick spot of embroidery to it. Very unlike me!

Cat bombed! You can see that the bottom of the shirt has been shaped more like a shirt than the previous version. I laid a shirt that I had in the drawer over the adapted pattern piece, and traced a new version with a little more room in the hip, and the curve at the bottom of the shirt. 

The back of the shirt fits well, though as you can see there are quite a lot of wrinkles in the bottom half of the shirt. I assume this is a sway back issue which needs to be adjusted some more, though maybe it's caused by bump so maybe best to wait before making any changes. 

Here's a little picture of bump, though the usual disclaimer applies, I'm bigger now blah blah ha ha. 

Alteration & Adaptation Cami 1: Wide shoulder adjustment

Aloha! Happy Friday everyone!

Well, I'm back to clothing and sewing and stuff. The past week has consisted of plans for the future, mixed with catching up on any of the things I may have lost track of during the madness of the last six weeks. Paul and I have been on the radio which was brilliant, though the 6am Saturday start two weeks in a row wasn't massively ideal. There are also some exciting plans in the pipeline, which I've been trying to keep track of and make sure I don't drop anything, there are so many things I want to do, I don't want to forget something!

No more episodes to review unfortunately, but I've been doing lots of sewing in the meantime, and am planning to do some more in depth posts on my process for sewing. I often find a pattern that has an element that I'm interested in, make adjustments to the fit so that it is spot on and then use that base pattern to make lots of different variations.

I want to show you how to do this from beginning to end. There will be gaps for light outfit posts in between as I don't know about you but sometimes I skip the heavy stuff thinking I'll go back to it when I need it so please feel free to do the same if you don't need this right now. But I thought I'd put my two pennies worth in to the pot on adjustment and adapting.

The first of which I'm doing today. Past readers of the blog may remember my first iteration of the Pauline Alice Cami dress, the Zig Zag Cami. The dress, although fantastically bright and much worn, does have some issues.

The armholes are a little tight, with the shoulder seams too narrow, not hitting the edge of my shoulder. The arms were also a little tight, you can see the wrinkles caused by this tightness across the arms in the picture above. Also, look how awesome the garden was in the Summer! I can't wait to get back into the garden properly again.

So it was time to do some adjustments! I decided to make a shirt, to test these changes, and to fill a hole in the wardrobe. I began by making a wide shoulder adjustment on to the bodice pieces, to ensure that the shoulder seam of the bodice would hit exactly on the edge of my shoulder. You can read fully about the process here. You can see a visual representation of the process below:

1.  To begin, start by drawing the seam allowances on to the bodice pieces

2.  Then draw on one line from the centre of the shoulder line down to the arm hole, stopping at the seam allowance. Follow this by marking a line from the corner of the armhole down to your new line

3.  Cut along both lines, making sure that you don't cut entirely through, so that the pieces can pivot as you can see above. In order to make the longer line pivot, snip horizontally in the seam allowance to the end point, again ensuring that you don't cut all the way through.

4.  Pivot these pieces to reflect the amount that you would like to widen the shoulder by, making sure that the lines match up along the top, and then re-trace.

I'll pause here, as I don't want to swamp you with too much information for a Friday, I mean it's quite obviously Pub o'clock.... what do you mean you're not going to the pub? Bath and knitting is it? Well, each to their own!

This weekend I will be stitching some more Spring clothes, I'm on a complete Washi kick, so that will be the pattern that I tackle next with regards adaptation. Also, if there are any techniques you would like to learn more about please feel free to leave a comment and I'll try to cover it in one of these posts.

Happy Friday!

Bit of a disclaimer: I will be writing about the adjustments I have made to garments as these are the ones I am currently most familiar with. Therefore, unfortunately I have not been able to cover the corresponding narrow shoulder adjustment for those people where the shoulder seam falls off the edge of the shoulder. However, there are so many resources out there, and I will always try and point you in the right direction where possible.