brown bear, brown bear

Well its been a few weeks and school is crazy, yahdeeyahdeeyah, I made a shirt. 

(Currently available for hire as an introduction writer; hmu)

So I made a couple of Scout tees after my first ones, but they were never quite right, and after a while I was thinking it may be time I let my woven tee dreams go. Which was hard, because: simple cut, woven prints, easy make, etc. But a couple weeks ago I remembered about my beloved Wiksten Tank (which fits perfect), and realized I could probably just add the sleeves from the Scout tee to the tank pattern (yes!). So I present to you the (first of many) Siksten Tee.

Now can we talk about this fabric? For those poor people who never read Eric Carle in your (or someone else's) childhood, the animals are from his book 'Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you See?'. When I pulled this fabric out of the box, my Mom recited practically the whole thing. It's beautiful. This was one of the main reasons I was sad about my (temporarily) dashed woven tee dreams, because patterns which you can make with quilting cottons open up a world of cute printed possibility.

I made the size S in the tank with size 2 sleeves, which worked together perfect, and I didn't even need to gather the sleeve (my least favourite part) to fit it in. It is a fairly stiff fabric, so I straightened the sides of the tank because structured+voluminous is a look that doesn't really work for me. I also shortened it by a couple of inches and got rid of the curved hem. For the binding I used a pretty stripey sheet.

Because I had so little and the repeat is so large, I didn't even bother trying to pattern match, and instead focused on not having the one bear who looks creepily back at the viewer over his behind in an obvious position (in the last picture you can see him peeking out by my left arm).

The only thing I'll change for next time is to try widening the upper, outer edge of the arm hole just a bit to make the seam sit a little closer to where it normally does on sleeved shirts.

a close up

 Before long, you will likely learn that I am a sucker for novelty prints.
Happy Sunday!