MBM - Style Arc Avery

The Avery Tunic Top was one of Style Arc’s freebie patterns for May. I thought it was quite a nice pattern, and would probably get made at some stage, sometime, someway, but not straight away, when I chose it.

Anyway, between placing my order, and the pattern plunking into my letterbox, I had given myself a bit of a talking-to about cracking on with sewing fabrics from the stash, inspired by the Stashbusting Sewalong Facebook group, and the process of Kondo-ising my wardrobe. My thinking being why have fabrics that “spark joy” to use Ms Kondo’s term, when it would be a whole lot better if they were garments that did the same thing. It didn’t take me long to identify fabric and zipper in the stash that I thought would work for the Avery, and because I’d made a few bread-and-butter basics recently, I thought it was time for a bit of a statement make. So Avery rocketed to Number 1 in the queue.

The fabrics are both from Tessuti. Avery is designed for a combination  of knit and woven fabrics. The sleeves and front yoke are in a viscose jersey, leftover from making Style Arc Pearl. The woven was a rayon/cotton blend (I think) that I bought on sale last year. The zip was one of a bag of miscellaneous zips I bought a Pitt Trading quite a while ago. From memory the bag cost me something like $5 for about a dozen metal teeth zips, so a bit of a bargain there!

As far as fit is concerned, I ordered a Size 12. The only piece I altered was the sleeve, in which I made a 1.5cm full bicep adjustment. I should have made it about 2.5cm – my arms look a bit like sausages. Not great, but not terrible either. The ease at bust was a bit line-ball for me, and I debated making an FBA, but in the end laziness reigned and I gambled a bit that I didn’t really need one. Happily, I think the gamble paid off.

Construction included two new-to-me operations. The first was the exposed zipper. Style Arc specifies a partially exposed zips, and to give them their due they include a number of diagrams (but not many words) to help you in the process. Unfortunately, they didn’t help me, so I went looking for tutorials. In my search I found this tutorial for a fully exposed zipper on the Craftsy blog. I quite liked the idea of a fully exposed zip, so I went with that. Because I was a bit doubtful that my drapey woven would cope well with the metal zip, I interfaced the yoke at the zip opening, as well as the yoke facing as directed. But then I always interface my zip openings, whatever the fabric.

The other new-to me operation was hem facings. I was bit nervous about this, especially getting the topstitching even around the curves, so I made cardboard templates and traced them onto the garment with a Frixion pen to ensure the topstitching lines were the same, left and right. That worked quite well.

Here is a photo that show the difference between the high/low hemline. It’s quite pronounced, not subtle! This was without any length alterations. I’m 5’9” so keep that in mind.

The sleeves are drafted quite long too. I normally add an inch to my long sleeves, but didn’t here, because I didn’t need to. Check your sleeve length!

I’m quite happy with the Avery. It’s a bit of different, and will work well with a lot of the bottom pieces in my wardrobe. The only reservation I have is how good the back will look after I’ve been sitting on it. These photos are brought to you fresh from the ironing board. This fabric holds a crease, so this could be a bit of an issue. Let’s see how I feel about it in due course