This Olive top that I made from offcuts of beautiful gauzy striped linen fulfils two important needs in my life. One it enables my scrap hoarding (you know how much I love sewing with scraps!) and two, for quite some time there has been a serious long sleeve top hole in my wardrobe.
I seem to have this hard ingrained warm weather sewing mentality, where for some reason my brain wants to sew garments for warm weather and that’s it. I can’t explain it beyond perhaps it being linked to the denial all Aussies live in as to the existence of winter. Let’s go with that ;)
As soon as we started working on the Olive pattern I knew it needed a long sleeve variation. For purely selfish reasons haha!
The problem was I just couldn’t make a decision on fabric! I can’t even tell you how much fussing there was.
But then I was tidying up our fabric storage at the studio and found a bag of offcuts from one of our local designers. As you may have noticed, sustainability is incredibly important to me, so I wanted to make sure my that the fabrics I stock are thoughtfully chosen. Most of the fabrics in my studio are sourced as dead stock from local Perth designers and finding new homes for this unused fabric makes me so happy!
One of my favourite designers had an amazing collection of handwoven fair trade fabrics that she had used in her latest collection – and when she had brought the remainder to us she also brought some of the special offcuts that she couldn’t bear to throw away. That really touched me because I do the same.
That’s when I noticed one set of offcuts included this gorgeous irregular stripe gauzy linen in my go to colour GREY haha and suddenly I knew it had to be an Olive top! Don’t you love it when that happens?!
I must admit my obsessive pattern matching side (see this Olive dress and these Flint shorts ) was really struggling with how irregular this weave was. It wasn’t so irregular that you could completely ignore the stripes, but not so regular that you could actually match them. I spent a stupidly long period of time with all the offcuts laid on my kitchen floor while I stared at them.
But after my poor family had to spend an entire weekend tip toeing around fabric offcuts I realised that there was only one arrangement that actually worked and CUT. *gasp*. I must admit I found it really hard to overcome my personal concerns about wearing horizontal stripes, but I think it’s good to go out of your comfort zone sometimes! I think I might actually be okay with wearing horizontal stripes on my upper body. That counts as personal growth right haha. I really love this gauzy striped Olive top and have worn it so much already this winter. The unexpected benefit of this linen gauze is how warm it is – which is a real win for this girl who doesn’t own enough warm clothing!
Now I just need to start another epic fabric hunt for my next make ;)
Make this look:
Top: Olive sewing pattern
Jeans: Dawn sewing pattern
Sneakers: Clae Bradley
