Morphing to McCall's 5469

No, it hasn't taken me all week to morph my Ottobre Woman tee pattern, but it has taken me from Monday until last night to again become productive in the sewing room. I have all these ideas and projects running around in my head and it's just been overwhelming. I keep talking myself in and then out of starting. Analysis paralysis. I finally decided yesterday that I would go ahead and let the other projects bubble around some more and just do this morph since it would be easy and fast and should bring the sewing mojo back.

Since this is a very easy morph, I'm glad again that I caught myself before ordering the pattern. I never would've sewn the actual pattern and would've only been paying for a picture I've already printed off.

I started with the plain front Ottobre Woman tee from the 02/2007 issue, pattern no. 2 with the 3/4 sleeves.

Then I decided how much I needed to add to the front for the 4 pleats. I settled on 1.5" pleats (.75" deep), spaced 1" apart. That meant adding an additional 3" to the Center Front of the pattern (2 x 1.5"). In the pic below, the yellow line is the original CF, the green line is the new CF, or cut-on-fold line, and the red shows the placement of the pleats.




I traced the Ottobre tee as-is and then added the 3" to the CF. I widened the neckline .5" at the shoulder for an inch total and also lengthened the top and back about 5" at the hem area, figuring I can always cut off what I don't want later.



Last was the sleeve. I'm trying out View B, which to me looks like a regular elbow-length sleeve with a long ruffle sewn on the bottom. I cut a straight section that is 8" wide and 2.5 times the width of the bottom of the sleeve. I used my original tracing of the 3/4 Ottobre sleeve and then just folded it up to where I thought it should be. Nothing scientific here (and no sleeve pics yet).

Here's what the front looks like so far:



I'm using a poly knit from Fabric Mart for two reasons. One, it's very drapey and, two, I have enough to make another top if this ones turns out to be a wadder. I didn't really want to start with a true (unwearable) muslin because this top is so simple to draft and sew that it's either going to work on me or it's not. Fitting shouldn't be an issue. But if I hated it, I didn't want to waste muslin time or lose a nice fabric. Since I had plenty of this, it won't bother me to toss some if I do end up hating it on me.

I sewed my pleats further down the front than the McCall's version because my bust is bigger than the model's. I figured the pleats shouldn't be poofing out right at apex level. I'm thinking of topstitching the pleat stitching with my coverstitch machine so they are more defined. I'll definitely be using the CS machine to bind the neckline.



So far, I'm liking what I see. It's full but because the fabric is drapey it looks tunic-y to me and not maternity. Do you agree?