Fabric: Laundered orange cotton from thrift shop $2, off cuts of Paradise Garden Wine from Love by Amy Butler for Rowan flannel fabric discount store $4.98
Patterns: Top – Simplicity 2892, Skirt – Simplicity 2154
Year: Contemporary
Notions: Zip $0.99 and thread
Time to complete: 16 hours
First worn: 26th March 2012
Wear again? Skirt, yes yes yes! Top…if I can turn the yoke around.
Total price: $7.97 (£4.99)
Challenge: “Pantone Spring Challenge: This week, we’re sewing using colors from the Pantone Spring Palette 2012.”
Ever since Mena announced that we’d be doing a challenge based on Pantone’s Spring Palette I’ve been carrying a printout of this in my handbag:
Mind you, I’ve also been carrying around a reel of tangerine tango coloured thread in my handbag too for a while….holding it up against every piece of orange material I could find in fabric stores and thrift shops.
I really really wanted to make something in tangerine tango as I don’t really do orange and I thought I should give it a try. I mean that’s one of the great things about the Sew Weekly challenges isn’t it, you make things you wouldn’t perhaps otherwise, so why not try new colours too. (And yes, I made the orange Angel of the North dress and shrug since I started my quest for the perfect tangerine fabric for the Pantone challenge. Oh and yes, the orange skirt for the Green challenge, that was a pillowcase I bought as an emergency plan B if I couldn’t find anything better).
Finally I found a roll of fabric marked up as ‘approx 3 yds’ in one of my favourite thrift shops for just $2 that seemed to match my thread perfectly. I had my tangerine tango. Yippee! And the colour thrilled me. I kept pulling it out of my stash drawers to gaze upon it. I bought matching nail varnish (Sally Hansen’s Hard as Nails Xtreme Wear in Crushed 290). Dammit, I even bought a matching lipstick. I’d been tangerine tango’d (and you KNOW when you’ve been tango’d….a little in-joke for the Brits there).
A few days later I was in my favourite discount fabric warehouse (see my blog for pics of it’s wonderful Aladdin’s Cave craziness) and spotted a couple of off-cuts of a really pretty floral fabric in the quilting cottons section. When I picked them up that I realised they were actually flannel….and by Amy Butler. So I had to have them for a future challenge sometime this year. It wasn’t until looking through my stash at the beginning of last week that I realised the fabric included a few of the Pantone Spring Palette colours – jackpot!
I’m not sure how well they translate on monitors but I’m claiming Cabaret, Bellflower and Cockatoo….and a near as dammit Tangerine Tango, Solar Power and Margarita. OK, so the Margarita might be stretching it a little – just squint you eyes and humour me. So that’s 6 of the colours. And as I had 5 of the colours in my nail varnish collection too, I’ve been sporting a palette of nail colours all week too.
I had just enough of the flannel to make a straight or pencil skirt. I decided to take what I’d learned (and the adjustments to fit I’d deduced were needed) from my bright orange ‘green’ Simplicity 2154 wearable muslin skirt I made for the Green challenge to have another go. I also heeded StephanieC’s advice about pegged skirts and made a timid attempt at pegging (I will be even braver next time….always learning).
I love the skirt and it will be interesting to see how the flannel copes with multiple wearing. I have a feeling it will pill a little but that’s nothing a roll of sellotape around the knuckles can’t sort.
As for the top…..blimey. I decided to go for a sleeveless top because I was short on time last week (off on a Doctor Who Impossible Astronaut roadtrip for Spring Break….pics and full details will be on fanbloomingtastic some time this week). “I know” I thought, “a sleeveless top from a pattern that boasts 6 easy designs will be quick”.
It wasn’t. Dimbo me decided to go for View E on Simplicity 2892….and the multiple gatherings of yokes and frills took forbloomingever!
Do I also admit that in my rush I sewed the yoke backwards to the main body of the top…..don’t tell anyone will you…..it will be our little secret…..oh no, what’s that I can hear? Sequinny sirens? It’s the Fashion Police come to get me! OK. It’s a fair cop….
My regrets…that I sewed the top too fast and without paying proper attention to getting yoke sewn the correct way around, and that I didn’t have enough fabric to match up the skirt pattern on the back central seam.
My reasons for happiness….that I’ve now refined a pencil skirt pattern to fit me nicely, and found that I am madly in love with tangerine tango. Addicted. You shall be seeing more no doubt.
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