Chasing Coco

I am trying to motivate myself to exercise more by making myself some cute active wear! Another bonus is I get to use my newish coverstitch machine on the finishing. I'm also finding out there are not a lot of cute active wear patterns! First I made Simplicity 8338, which was in my stash and then I was looking around also at some of the indie designers and just couldn't find what I was really looking for. I almost *gasp* bought some new workout tops but as I was looking at the ones I liked, I though, "hell I can hack that from a tank top pattern." And so I set out to do just that! Here was my inspiration pic. I didn't like the curved lower edge but I quite liked the shape of the opening. In thinking this through, I decided I could use a tank pattern with a back seam and as way to make the finishing around the back cut out easier, I decided I did not want to do binding (I avoid binding like the plague) and I thought I could do a band or coverstitch arou...

One of my coworkers was wearing a really cute top with a tie-front a few weeks ago and as luck would have it, another sewist posted a tie-front tank top. I asked her about it and she said she'd hacked it and posted a picture of her pattern piece and I thought "well, if she can do it, I can do it!" You can do it too :-) This was a really easy hack! For mine, I used the Ellie and Mac Going Home Sweater  (afflink). It's a pretty basic raglan style pattern with t-shirt, tunic and dress lengths. For this hack, I used the t-shirt length of the pattern and a double brushed poly from CaliFabrics. To add the tie-front, I traced off the front pattern piece on to my trusty bee paper . Instead of adding a band around the bottom, I would need to hem it so I added an 1 inch to the bottom to give myself some hem space. Near the center fold, I drew my tie shape using my French curve . I made sure to not make it on the fold, but near and then made a slight curve inward at t...