An isolation birthday shirt

I haven't been doing a lot of sewing lately.  A lot of it has to do with not having a dedicated sewing space that is set up all the time any more, it just makes it that little bit harder to get started.  The other thing is I really don't need any new winter clothes, and it's not warm enough here yet for me to start thinking about summer clothes.  Add in the fact that I don't have many winter fabrics in stash and I'm just stagnating.

However the other day I was trying to clean up some of my fabric storage and realised that what I want is some sort of project that really gets me thinking and I came up with the idea of making a winter top out of all my left over scrap fabrics.  Double whammy it gets rid of some of those little pieces of fabric I have lying around, plus it also makes a good project.

So the first thing to do was to figure out what fabrics to use.  I pulled out all my winter weight fabric scraps and sorted them into different weights. I found the left overs from my bright green shirt and decided I really wanted to use it and there was a scrap of black sweater fleece left over from my rainbow zipper dress.  I figured that these would work really nicely together.

The green fabric was very limited so I decided to use it as accents only and started sketching different designs.  I settled on a design with a large green triangle on front split into 4 different triangles plus a triangle on each shoulder and each sleeve. 

I traced out my pattern.  I went with the same Simplicity 5133 pattern for a basic knit shirt.  I sketched in my triangles on the front and sleeve pieces, modifying the shoulder pieces slightly to make sure they fitted on the scraps of fabric I had.

I cut my pattern pieces along the seam lines and cut out each of my green pieces.  I then figured that I had enough scraps left over to just get two small triangles on the back so traced out the back pattern piece and added a triangle at the center top and another at the center bottom.

I was pretty much down to just scraps of green by now so I moved onto my black.

I took the remaining pieces of pattern and went to lay them on my black fabric only to find out that I didn't have enough.......what now.  Another peruse of my stash and I found a scrap of fabric way down the back that is double faced knit, black on one side and grey on the other.  I originally used it to make this reversible shirt.  I held it up against my other black and it was close enough so I decided to use that as well.  I ended up cutting my front and sleeves from my rainbow zipper dress black and the back, neckband, cuffs and bottom band out of the reversible black.

Now to hope that they don't fade/shrink at different rates.  These photos were taken after a couple of washes and it all seems good so far!

Because I don't have my serger set up upstairs I just totally skipped doing any seam finishing on the shirt.  All seams are just left as is.  I think this is the first time I've done this in quite some time.

The shirt was easy to sew together, all my points lined up nicely and there were no surprises.  I put this together in a day.  It just so happened to be the day before my birthday, so I was able to wear it for the first time on my birthday so it has now been dubbed my isolation birthday shirt.  It was nice to have something new and pretty to wear on my birthday.

So anyway I really love the way this shirt turned out and will be wearing it lots till it gets too hot.