The Trouble With a Stash....

I don't do a lot of fabric mixing in individual items, but when knitting, I will often be mixing yarns for certain effects. Often though, I just don't have the right yarn to go with what I already have...so the stash grows. That's not usually too much of an issue for me with fabric. I buy a piece of fabric, I use it,  I keep big scraps for Boxerwear flies, or crotch linings in underwear, or sometimes bands. So as long as I'm sewing as fast as I'm buying (ha!) the stash won't significantly grow.

But sometimes a piece comes in and sits there. Could be I loved it, but it wasn't as big as I thought. Or the material is not right for anything I'm working on. Sometimes I have bought fabric and then changed my mind about the project. That's what happened with this salmonish stretch lace yardage. I picked it out to make a "belly band"--a loop of stretchy material or lace worn over your pants waistband to smooth it out and /or fill the gap if they're a bit low or your shirt is short. Megan liked the colour and also wanted a bathing suit cover up because it matched.

Neither of those things happened. Megan's bathing suit faded so quickly (do I even have a blog post about it?). So the lace sat there. I thought I might use it when I made the rayon "pillowcase" dress. I thought I could colour block the sleeves but the family thought it looked odd. So the fabric sat. I kept seeing lace everywhere though and thought it was time to do something, especially after making the tank tops with the lace down the center back. I wanted to expand out a bit. At first, I thought I'd do the sleeves in lace. Too predictable. Then I saw some shirts with the back yoke in lace. Nice, but not quite right (looking at my photos, apparently I did make a tank top with a lace yoke). Then I saw my mother-in-law in a split back t-shirt  and thought, if she's wearing one, I need one. But of course, none of my fabric was suitable.

Off I trudged to FabricLand with my fabric. I'm so picky about matching colours. I was not optimistic. I walked around, everything was too expensive. I headed to the clearance/remnant bin, and found two good sized pieces of fabric. One was a woven that I thought my girls' might like as shorts but still matched the lace (they turned it down), and one was this knit. It's a little thicker, with a plush feel. Could be a ponte?

I got out my t-shirt pattern, all set to hack. First up, I had to create the back yoke. No problem. The petal pieces weren't hard too, though I had just done a swayback adjustment on something and loved how it looked so I was disappointed to not be able to really do that. I thought about it a long time though. Then I got really creative, and decided I wanted to split the yoke and do the stripes on the bias. Pointing up.

I needed some strong coffee for this. And in the end, though my stripes matched awesome, they were pointing down! LOL. I didn't have a lot of fabric, so I just went with it.

 Everything else on this top was a pure fluke. I decided to cut the neckband going the opposite way than normal (it was still stretchy), so it would have little vertical stripes. I had absolutely no intention of it matching at the back. Never even thought of the possibility while planning.

 And I sure as heck did not think about having the yoke stripes match the sleeve stripes!  Holy cow, I could not believe my luck. Perhaps it makes me look a little wider, but that is a lucky sewing-win if I've ever had one. And even more incredible was that both sleeves turned out like this, not just one. If it was only one, that would have been really odd looking.

The two layers of lace still seemed a little see-through, and with the way they curve and there's only one layer at the sides, I worried about my bra showing and if it would be school friendly. I didn't get to wear it to school, but I  think it's fine. Next time, I could make the yoke longer, or more likely, make the back pieces angle more sharply and meet at the sides lower. However, I doubt I'll do this again in the lace. If I made the angle different, due to my short height, those pieces are going to lose the nice curve and I might as well just totally overlap two normal pieces, sewing them together most of the way down. I guess that is an option, but I wanted a bit of looseness.  My mom's not a fan of the shirt, but this time, it's just she doesn't like this style. It wasn't about how it looked on me. I hope I get to wear it more. I don't know if I wore it again this summer. I've gotten to the point where I have more favourites than I really need. Do I get rid of the old frumpy t-shirts?