From Sue To You

The area that needs the most help in my wardrobe is my weekend/casual clothing. For some reason, I always shop for work clothes (and I have more than I really need) when I am buying RTW. And with shops like New York & Co., I convince myself that the career clothes can transition to weekend wear; however, when I look in my closet, I see a whole lot of office lady stuff and very little in the fun department.

The Vogue batwing pattern certainly fit the non-office lady bill. From reading other reviews, I already knew that I wanted to copy the cuff treatment of Sew Red Robyn and that some kind of neck binding needed to be added since I didn’t want to go Flashdance with this shirt. I always dread improvising in the neck area because that tends to be an accident prone area for me and a mistake there will be an eye sore for me for the life of the garment. I thought I could lessen the chance of error by using the neck binding from the scoop neck Renfrew by Sewaholic since they seemed to have a similar shape.

As you can see, I was still able to screw it up!:

I believe my problem was cutting the neck binding on the bias. I should have known when the fit was too perfect while pinning–my best results are when you have to do some finagling to get the binding to stretch. As soon as I stitched it on and slipped it over my head, I saw the neckline was gaping wide. Since this was a muslin of sorts (used inexpensive stash knit), I just went with squaring up the neckline with pleats. I didn’t want to invest the time in totally redoing the neck on this one.

End result: Wearable enough for me, but I will (possibly) try again with a non-bias cut neckline and baste first. Also, I started with the hi-lo version and lopped it off because it created a pretty unflattering hemline (on me). I prefer the shorter length for me, but having seen the photos, I can confirm that this style isn’t really my favorite look regardless of the neck situation. And there are plenty of other patterns in my to do pile so I think the batwing is going on the backburner for a bit.